Minesweeper, counted by chess pieces.
Five mines are hidden on a small board. The chess pieces standing on it are your only clues: each piece shows how many mines it can see, and a piece sees exactly the squares it could move to. A rook counts its row and its column, a bishop its diagonals, a knight its eight jumps, a king its neighbours, a queen all of it.
No board needs a guess.
Every board is built and checked by a solver: from any position you can reach by playing correctly, there is always a next flag or a next move you can prove. If you feel forced to guess, you have missed something — or we have, and we want to hear about it.
How to play
- Left click a square to open it. Opening a mine ends the board.
- Left click a piece, then a square it sees, to move it there — the piece then counts from its new square.
- Right click a square to flag a mine, again to mark it a maybe, again to clear it. A flag is your own note, and the game never checks it.
- Right click a piece to pin its sight, so two clues can be read at once.
- The board is solved when every safe square is open.
The pieces are not introduced one at a time: several kinds stand on the board from the very first one, queens included. What arrives one at a time is the reasoning: a move to spend, blocks that stop a piece's sight, two clues that only decide together, a placement rule, three clues at once.
Three tiers of ten boards.
Beginner, intermediate and expert, and the words are measured ones: each tier caps how much you have to hold in your head at once, at the same three levels beginner, intermediate and expert Minesweeper ask for. A tier opens when the one before it is finished. Every board is one you have not seen: each position deals from a stack built and checked in advance, and never deals the same board twice.
This is an early build, played in the browser. It is here for feedback. Three things I would love to know: where you first did not understand what to do, whether any board made you guess, and what you thought the right click on a piece does. Comments below.
Best played with a mouse, in the frame or fullscreen.
Credits. Chess piece artwork: Chess Simple Assets by Maciej Świerczek, CC BY 4.0 (recoloured, pawn dropped). Typeface: PT Mono by Alexandra Korolkova and Isabella Chaeva, ParaType. Title music adapted from Debussy, "Des pas sur la neige". Built with LÖVE and love.js.
Analytics. The browser version counts a few anonymous events: when a run starts, when a board is won or lost (with the tier, the board's number, the time and the moves), when a run ends, and any error that stops the game. They go to Plausible Analytics. No cookies, nothing is stored on your device, and nothing identifies you.