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The goal is to reveal every square that does not hide a mine. You never have to find the mines themselves - clearing everything else wins the game. Each number you uncover counts the mines in the eight squares touching it, diagonals included, and that single rule is the whole game. Your first click is always safe here, and it usually opens a large area to start from.

A worked example: reading a 1-2-1

This is the formation you will meet most often, and it is completely solvable - no guessing involved. Three numbers sit in a row along a wall with three covered squares beneath them:

Test the middle square. If it hid a mine, that one mine would sit next to both 1s and satisfy them each completely - which would force the two outer squares to be safe. But then the 2 would be touching only one mine when it needs two. That is impossible, so the middle square cannot be a mine.

With the middle ruled out, each 1 has exactly one square left to hold the mine it is counting. So the mines are under the two 1s, and those two mines are precisely what the 2 was asking for. Every number checks out:

Note that the answer is the opposite of what intuition suggests - the low numbers mark the danger here, not the high one. That is why these formations are worth memorising rather than re-deriving under a running clock. The full pattern guide covers the 1-2-2-1, the 2-1-2 and the wall 1-1, or you can play boards that are guaranteed solvable by logic alone in No-Guessing mode.

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Where Minesweeper came from

Microsoft released Minesweeper in the Entertainment Pack in 1990, then bundled it with Windows 3.1 in 1992. The game helped new computer users practise precise left- and right-clicking. It stopped shipping as a built-in game with Windows 8 in 2012, when Microsoft moved its games into the Store. The full history goes deeper, including what the game was really designed to teach.