Is there a Minesweeper that never makes you guess?

A solver works through every GregSweeper daily, weekly, and ladder board before it goes out, and a board is published only if the whole thing can be deduced from the marked opening square. No board needs a coin flip to finish.

How long does a daily take?

Predicted times run from about twenty seconds to four minutes, most days toward the shorter end, with roughly one board a week that makes you work.

When does the daily board change?

At midnight Eastern time. Everyone plays the same board on the same date, wherever they are.

Can Minesweeper be played on hexagons instead of squares?

Yes. Minesweeper only needs each cell to have neighbors, so any tiling works. The daily rotates through seven: squares, hexagons, octagons, two pentagon tilings, rhombi, and kites.

What is a Minesweeper handicap?

A multiplier fitted from your own past games, in the golf sense. Your personal par is a board's predicted time scaled by your handicap, so the leaderboard scores each player against their own expectation rather than against the fastest player.

Yes. It is free, has no ads, and needs no account to play.

About GregSweeper

GregSweeper is a free daily Minesweeper puzzle. One board a day, the same board for everyone, and no account needed to play it.

You never have to guess. A solver checks every board first.
Boards are not always square. Hexagons, octagons, pentagons and more.
Every board has a predicted time, and every player has a handicap.

It started as a way to keep playing Minesweeper without the two things that always ended a run for me: losing to a coin flip on the last two squares, and having no idea whether a board I had just cleared was actually a hard one. Greg, the crab who fronts the game, is the part that checks the boards and keeps notes on how people solve them.

You never have to guess

A solver works through every daily, weekly, and ladder board before anyone plays it, and I publish a board only if the whole thing can be deduced from the marked opening square. No board needs a coin flip to finish.

The difficulty stays. Once no square can be settled by luck, every square has to be earned, and a hard board is hard for reasons you can point at afterward.

Boards are not always square

Minesweeper counts the mines touching a cell, and nothing about that requires the cell to be a square. Any tiling of the plane gives each cell its neighbors, so the daily rotates through seven of them:

Classicsquares, 8 neighbors
Honeycombhexagons, 6
Octagonsoctagons and squares, 8 and 4
Paving Stonesirregular pentagons, 7
Petalspentagons in rosettes, 8
Kitesfour-sided tiles, 9
3D Cubesrhombi that read as stacked cubes, 10

Honeycomb six neighbors

3D Cubes ten neighbors

Those neighbor counts are the reason the shapes play differently. A 3 on a hexagon leaves three unknowns to place among six cells; the same 3 on a cube board has ten to work with, and the patterns you read without thinking on squares stop being obvious. Each shape gets its own difficulty rating for that reason.

Every board has a par, and every player has a handicap

Every board has a predicted time called par, worked out from the reasoning it actually requires rather than its size or its mine count. Two boards with identical dimensions and identical mine counts routinely get different pars, because one of them makes you stall and the other does not.

Then each player gets a handicap in the golf sense, fitted from their own past games. Your personal par is the board's par scaled by your handicap, so the leaderboard compares each person against their own expectation instead of against the fastest clicker. A slower player having an unusually good day can beat a faster one having an ordinary one.

Both numbers are re-fitted overnight from the games people played that day. How par and handicaps are worked out has the detail.

The model keeps a public notebook

Fitting difficulty from real games leaves a lot uncertain, and Greg's Journal, inside the game, is where that uncertainty gets written down. Each entry covers one thing the model has yet to pin down: what is being measured, how many days of data have gone into it, how wide the estimate still is, and whether the last refit moved it. Entries close when an estimate settles and reopen when it drifts.

The rest of it

A weekly board, bigger than the daily. It stands for the whole week, you get one attempt per day, and your best time counts.
A 250-level ladder with checkpoints, and an endless run past the top.
Head-to-head runs of up to ten boards against friends, scored on raw and handicap-adjusted time.
Modifiers that bend the usual rules on some boards: a cell that hides its number, a pair of cells that swap counts, a wall that blocks two neighbors from seeing each other. Each one gets explained the first time it turns up.
Chaos mode, which drops the no-guess guarantee in exchange for speed.
Five board themes, all free.

Practical things

GregSweeper is free, has no ads, and runs in a browser on phone or desktop. You can add it to a home screen and play offline. Playing signed out works fine; signing in exists so your streak and stats follow you between devices. What gets stored and for how long is in the privacy policy.

Common questions

Is there a Minesweeper that never makes you guess?: A solver works through every GregSweeper daily, weekly, and ladder board before it goes out, and a board is published only if the whole thing can be deduced from the marked opening square. No board needs a coin flip to finish.
How long does a daily take?: Predicted times run from about twenty seconds to four minutes, most days toward the shorter end, with roughly one board a week that makes you work.
When does the daily board change?: At midnight Eastern time. Everyone plays the same board on the same date, wherever they are.
Can Minesweeper be played on hexagons instead of squares?: Yes. Minesweeper only needs each cell to have neighbors, so any tiling works. The daily rotates through seven: squares, hexagons, octagons, two pentagon tilings, rhombi, and kites.
What is a Minesweeper handicap?: A multiplier fitted from your own past games, in the golf sense. Your personal par is a board's predicted time scaled by your handicap, so the leaderboard scores each player against their own expectation rather than against the fastest player.
Is GregSweeper free?: Yes. It is free, has no ads, and needs no account to play.

Built by Christopher Wells. Feedback and bug reports are welcome; there is a contact address at the bottom of the privacy policy.

Play today's board →

← Back to GregSweeper