Eight Around
No board here ever needs a guess. Your first tap builds it, so it can never be a mine.
What it is
Find the mines without touching one. Each number says how many of the squares around it hold a mine, and the whole game is reading those numbers against each other.
The board arrives covered. There is no difficulty picker in front of you and no title screen — your first tap is what makes the board.
No board ever needs a guess
This is the reason most people stopped playing the original: ten minutes of correct play, then two squares that are genuinely indistinguishable and a coin to flip. It does not happen here.
Boards are generated and then played through by a solver that only makes deductions a person could make. A board that stalls is thrown away rather than shown to you. Every loss is therefore a deduction that was sitting on the board — and when you lose, the game works out which kind it was rather than telling you something reassuring it never checked.
The three tiers are three kinds of reasoning, not three densities. The gentlest never once asks you to compare two clues against each other; the hardest expects you to account for several at once. That is a real difference, and it is not something a density slider can give you.
Your first tap makes the board
The mines are dealt into the squares outside the one you touched and the ones around it. So a first tap can never be a mine, and it always opens ground rather than a lone number sitting on its own.
It also means the next person to walk up finds a covered board rather than somebody else's half-played position.
How to play
- Open a squareTap it
- Flag a mineHold it
- Take a flag offTap it
Holding to flag is the default. A flag you have just placed comes off again with a plain tap, while an older one still protects the square it sits on — so a fast double-tap cannot undo work you meant to keep.
Your flags are never part of the reasoning. A flag is what you believe, not what the numbers say, and one wrong flag was enough to make the game draw a false conclusion from it.
On a desktop, click to open a square and right-click to flag it; holding the button down flags it too. In a window wider than it is tall, the board lies on its side, fourteen squares across and eight down. Only the picture turns, so a game in progress survives the window changing shape.
What isn't settled yet
Whether holding to flag is discoverable without being told. It is the oldest unsolved problem in touch minesweeper and the answer here is a choice, not a proof — nobody who has never seen it has tried it yet.
Whether the hardest tier is too hard for the room this is built for. It expects you to hold several clues in mind at once, which is satisfying at a desk and may be the wrong ask in a waiting room.
Build Log
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Build 7
The board now turns sideways when the frame it is in is wider than it is tall: fourteen squares across and eight down instead of the other way round. Only the picture turns — the board underneath is the same board, so a game survives being resized mid-play and the squares keep their numbers and their neighbours. In a 960 by 600 window the squares went from 35 pixels across to 58, and the board from 300 pixels wide to 844. Fixing it turned up something that had been broken for two builds: on a computer, right-clicking placed a flag and then immediately took it off again, so flagging with a mouse was impossible. Worth writing down, because it is the general shape of the thing: a control that is only ever tested with one kind of input will eventually be broken for the other, and reading the code that handles it proves nothing.
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Build 5
Holding a square to flag it became the default, and a flag you have just placed now comes off again with a plain tap, while an older one still protects the square it is on. Fixing that turned up something worse: the board only accepted a new touch once the previous one had finished, so a single touch whose release never arrived left the whole board dead and looking like the game had frozen. A new touch now takes over from an unfinished one. Worth writing down: any rule of the form ‘ignore input until the last input finishes’ will eventually meet an input that never finishes.
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Build 4
When you lost, the game used to tell you that something else on the board had still been workable. Nothing checked that — the sentence was written once and shown every time. It now works the position out at the moment you lose and says which of two things happened: the square you hit was already obvious from a single clue, or it took more than one clue to see. The same change took your flags back out of the reasoning entirely, because a flag is what you believe rather than what the numbers say, and one wrong flag was enough to make the game draw a false conclusion from it.
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Build 2
The board used to arrive with a patch of it already opened, before anyone had touched it. It now arrives covered, and your first tap makes it: the mines are dealt into the squares outside the one you touched and the ones around it, so a first tap can never be a mine and always opens ground rather than a lone number. Worth writing down, because it applies to anything left running on a shared screen: a board that is already part-played reads as somebody else's abandoned game, which is the one thing the next person walking up should not find.
Credits and licences
No third-party engine and no embedded typefaces — it uses whichever fonts your device already has. Cover art was rendered from the game’s own board.
Eight Around is original work by Launchway Games.