Minesweeper Demystified Part 1 - One Pattern and combinations

By the end of this blog series, you should be able to play minesweeper at Novice level. Minesweeper is all about pattern recognition and effective chording. The rest is just practice and as they say, practice makes perfect. 

The first part of the series will tackle the one part and its combinations, the next one will be two and its combinations and so forth. If you would like to see all the patterns at once, you can check out the video at the end of this blog post.

Patterns

1 at the corner

1 at corner

Where there is 1 and it is at a corner, there is a mine there as you can see in the image above. This is a very common pattern and you will see it a lot. It will really help open up the game very fast once you become effective at chording it.

1-1-1-1 from the bottom

1-1-1-1

The third one from the bottom always has no mine. The first two squares have a one point to them. This means there is a mine between the two squares but we don't know which one. Logically, the third one can't have a mine as it will contradict the first two squares.

1-2-1 Combination

1-2-1

This pattern is a favorite one of mine and combined with the first pattern, you can make a lot of ground in the game. Each square that shows a one has a mine and the middle square with 2 has no mine to satisfy the condition 1-2-1. 

Thank you for reading all the way to the end. I hope this blog post has shed some light in terms of understanding the patterns of minesweeper. If you would like to see this and more patterns in action, you can check out the video below.