How to Code Minesweeper: A Complete Guide to Building the Game from Scratch
Everything you need to build Minesweeper from scratch: the data model, mine placement, flood-fill reveal, win/lose logic, and language-by-language tutorials.
Coding Minesweeper
Coding Minesweeper: Programming Tutorials and Algorithms
Minesweeper is one of the best projects for learning to program, because it packs a 2D grid, recursion, randomness, event handling and a clean win/lose state into something you can finish in an afternoon. These tutorials build it from first principles in several languages, and go under the hood of the algorithms themselves: how mines are placed, how the first click is guaranteed safe, and how flood fill opens an entire empty region in one action.
The five pieces every implementation needs
The grid
A 2D array where each cell holds its state: mine or not, revealed or not, flagged or not, and its neighbor count.
Mine placement
Scatter mines at random after the first click, not before. Generating the board late is what makes the first click safe by construction.
Neighbor counting
For every non-mine cell, count the mines in the eight cells around it. Handle edges and corners, which have fewer neighbors.
Flood fill
When a player opens a cell with a count of zero, recursively open its neighbors. This is what produces the large opening on a first click.
Win and lose
You lose when a mine is revealed. You win when every non-mine cell is revealed - not when every mine is flagged, which is a common bug.
Coding Minesweeper articles
Other Minesweeper topics
Validate an implementation against the game itself: check the canonical rules, inspect deductions in the solver, then compare board workload with 3BV.