Crossmines is one of the best advancements of Minesweeper ever created. ... completely tears up any strategy a player may have hoped of carrying over from the original game.
Crossmines is a development of the minesweeper game. Here, cells are not just square-shaped, and may link with other cells. The result is a game of logic that can be enjoyed by casual players and puzzle enthusiasts.
You can play the simple 'classic minesweeper' game, or choose some of the more challenging Crossmines variations that add a new depth of thinking to the game. More experienced players will develop strategies that avoid unnecessary risk, and use sophisticated logic to deduce the locations of hidden mines.
Crossmines in action, showing
holes and shaped cells
(shown 50% scale)
After playing most minesweeper games for a few rounds, players fall into a boring mechanical pattern and start thinking less! Crossmines gives you more variations, which breaks up the regular logic so you have to keep thinking to solve the puzzles.
When you choose a new game, just click on a Quick Setting 1 to 10. Progress through the levels to see the variations that Crossmines offers. You can also configure you own game.
When you first start playing Crossmines (Level 1), you'll see a regular minesweeper board, and chances are you'll know how to play it. Level 2 looks a bit more difficult: the minefield is bigger, and there are more mines, which makes deduction a bit more difficult. At this point, you're still playing the regular minesweeper game.
At Level 3, we introduce new features, starting with holes. Holes are dead zones, which do not contain mines and cannot be tested. They make the game that bit more difficult, and encourages you to look at the minefield more carefully.
We introduce shaped cells, where cells are larger. This really changes gameplay, because larger cells can have more neighbours, and the shapes of the cells make you think more carefully about what surrounds them.
If you survive Level 5, Level 6 presents a novel challenge: linked cells. This means that a cell might be connected to another cell somewhere else on the minefield, and effectively the two (or more) connected cells act as if they are one cell. This means that when you see a '3' in a linked cell (and of course the same number in its linked partners), you need to find, among the neighbours of all those linked cells, a total of three cells containing mines.
Later levels crank up the difficulty, using the above features. If you get stuck or frustrated with the progressive levels, don't worry: you can tweak the new game settings yourself. Games are randomly generated, so you'll not be playing the same minefield twice.
