Most of the fun comes from figuring out how to play the game. This player didn't.
A subgenre of Puzzle Games, these games or minigames are based on Minesweeper. They typically involve a tile-based board where all tiles are initially hidden. You click on a tile to reveal its contents and use the clue to decide what tile to click or not click on next. This is done until a goal of some kind is achieved, usually uncovering all tiles having/not having something or reaching a goal. The player can also fail by running out of time, turns, or clicking on something they're not supposed to. There have been games that adopted a model similar to the Trope Maker but came out before it or didn't employ clicking as the main mechanic, though.
Examples:
- Action 52 has Meong, the 19th game. You control an A52 logo and walk through three grid fields. Some tiles are traps which you can tell if you watch their animations. Standing in one spot for a few seconds blows you up. Also, the layouts are not randomised and the furthest side columns are typically empty.
- Anti-Idle: The Game has Mindsweeper, a minigame available in the arcade. The game says that most of the fun comes from figuring out how to play, which is why it doesn't provide instructions. If you're curious, though - The goal is clicking on the blue orb which is the exit and provides 2 extra turns for the next round. You may find XP or White Coin squares which don't help with the minigame, but give those resources in the main game. An arrow points to the general direction to the goal. A red number tells you how far the goal is from the square, both vertically and horizontally (so a 6 may mean it's 5 squares above and 1 square to the left). A normal number indicates how many boxes surrounding the square are not normal numbers, as in any other tile type mentioned above. You have 10 minutes and 50 turns to beat one board with a few turns being restored every time you do so, which also increases your score multiplier by 1.
- BeTrapped! has its first half play this way. You walk around a tile-based room with traps scattered all over. The color of a tile indicates how many traps are adjacent (0 is blue, 1 is green, 2 is yellow, 3 is orange, 4 is red, 5 is pink). Violet tiles are blocked and can't be stepped on. You have to disarm traps by ctrl+clicking them which also makes their tiles black. There are also red and yellow skulls traps which don't show up as adjacent traps but you have to step off them quickly if you land on one.
- If you choose the military career path in Bitlife, you will eventually get a deployment order which triggers a minesweeper mini game if you accept it. You basically have to clear squares you think are safe and flag the boxes you think the mines are in. Each non-mine square has a number hint on it that tells you how many mines are near the square and/or its corners. If you win, you get a medal of honor. However, if you hit a mine, you might end up getting serious injuries (if you don't die from the explosion that is). You can always refuse to play the game by deserting your post but you will get sent to jail as a result.
- ClueSweeper is a murder mystery game that plays mostly like Minesweeper but also has elements of Clue thrown in. You are a detective investigating a murder with multiple suspects, and clicking on the correct tiles reveals information about the murderer or one of the suspects, which you must cross-reference to figure out who committed the crime.
- Castle Cats has a minigame called "Super Sweeper" during the annual Call of Heroes event. Winning it, losing in a particular way, etc a certain number of times unlocks the ability to craft cosmetic items during the event.
- DemonCrawl is Minesweeper with roguelike aspects built into it; there's health and revives, various helpful items and strangers, stores and other stages to aid you, several unlockable and buyable items to add to the item pool, Masteries that provide useful abilities, and new mechanics like tiles with varying effects or Pathfinding. There's also Omens which can nerf your character, Stage Mods which can increase or decrease the stage's difficulty, and bosses who roam the last stage of a quest and provide negative effects to you upon picking up Dark Hearts that spawn on the field.
- Hear Your Path: The goal is getting through a maze by clicking tiles with notes that complete a song. Each note is initially hidden, but right-clicking a tile lets you hear its sound (some useless tiles are instead made unclickable on normal). The game encourages finding the exit while making as few mistakes as possible.
- Hexceed: You click on a hexagonal tile to reveal numbers. Each number indicates how many hexagons are mines next to it. You have to mark all of them and uncover all safe hexagons to finish a level. There are also setpieces like walls and arrows that may change which tiles the numbers refer to.
- Hidden City has the Excavation mini-game, which is basically Minesweeper with hexagonal tiles instead of squares.
- HyperRogue has the Minefield, a land based on Minesweeper where the player is told how many mines are adjacent to any given tile and must reach treasures without stepping on mines.
- Kaboom
(not to be confused with the Atari 2600 game) is a cruel, but fair Minesweeper game as explained by the creator. It still has you trying to uncover all empty tiles and flagging mines, but the mines aren't generated at the start but rather are placed as you play and if the game detects you attempting to guess your way through, it will always assume the worst scenario (as in, mine in the face). That said, if you're forced to guess because there are no safe cells left, then doing so is completely safe.
- Legend of the Golden Robot: Every area is a 30+ tile grid in which you click to move and dig to uncover things. The number which you get when you dig something shows how many items surround the square. You have 24 hours each day, with 1 hour being eaten up every time you move and several hours (depending on the shovel equipped and terrain) when you dig.
- Mamono Sweeper is Minesweeper with one major gameplay twist: Instead of mines, you have to watch out for monsters of varying levels instead, and numbers no longer indicate the number of enemies around them but the total level of the surrounding monsters. Starting at Level 1 yourself, you have to seek out enemies of matching or lower level that you can click on safely, until you gain enough EXP to level up and clear out stronger enemies. Clicking on enemies of a higher level will lower your HP, and obviously, you lose if you drop to 0 HP. The goal is to clear every tile, including the monster tiles, starting from the lower levels to the highest level monsters. However, the game also has Blind Mode where you are Level 0 and cannot fight monsters, so you have to click every non-monster tile like in more conventional games of this genre.
- Mined-Out is the Ur-Example. You move a worm across an invisible 19x30 board and check the number of adjacent mines in the top-left corner to decide where to go, with the highest number being 4 as the game doesn't count them if they're placed diagonally to you. Level 2 introduces two hidden bugs called damsels who are given bonus points when rescued, though they only give bonus points. Level 3 brings out a mine spreader who adds mines but also removes a few previously hidden once. Starting from level 4 you'll also have a bug who wanders around the area and counts as a walking mine. Level 6 makes your path disappear behind you, making it hard to remember where you've been. Level 8 closes the gap unless you get to a situation where you are surrounded by 3 mines. On level 9 you have to rescue Bill and win the game. This is the earliest known game that feels similar to Minesweeper going as far back as the ZX Spectrum in 1983 and might have inspired it to some extent.
- Minesweeper is the Trope Maker. You click on a tile and see the number on it. That number tells you how many mines are adjacent to the tile. You use it as a clue to decide which tiles to click on and which ones to flag, as flagged tiles have mines. Clicking on a mine results in a game over. To win, you must uncover all safe tiles.
- In Pokemon Heart Gold And Soul Silver, the game corner has the game "Voltorb Flip", in which the goal is to get as many coins as possible without clicking on a Voltorb tile. It also hints at what squares likely contain a Voltorb with numbers on the top and side.
- Power Pro-kun Pocket 2 has a minigame of this sort in the War Edition. You have to reach the end while avoiding mines and potentially collecting items along the way.
- Progressbar 95 has Progress Sweeper, a game mode introduced in version 0.54. Your objective is to collect enough blue segments to fill the progress bar to 100% as each one fills it by 5% while avoiding orange and red ones, as the former still fill the bar but don't give points after clearing the level and the latter make you lose a life. After uncovering a tile, it may have an orange or red number which means how many of those segments surround it. You can put an orange or red flag on tiles you think have those segments, which gives bonus points after beating the level if you flag correctly. Clearing a level in this mode gives 1.25x the usual points, as it is intended to be more challenging than the main game.
- PsyCard is this, but with Psychic Powers, cards instead of tiles, and a win in a round by finding 3 fruit cards.
- A ROBLOX Quest: Elements of ROBLOXia includes an optional minigame called "Visor Sweeper". The game is played with multi-colored visor hats on a 5x5 grid, and the mines are replaced by both black visors, which cause you to lose money, and bombs, which end the game. If you win Visor Sweeper, you get a special badge.
- RuneScape: The Vinesweeper minigame is essentially a more forgiving variation of Minesweeper. Players dig up patches of a farmer's field to learn how many seeds are buried in the adjacent tiles, but unlike the original Minesweeper, the goal is to place flags on the "mines" (in this case, buried potato seeds) instead of completely avoiding them, and instead of having to clear the entire boardnote players are given reward points (which are traded for seeds that are used outside of the minigame) for every safe tile they dig up and for every "mine" they successfully flag. Points are deducted from the player's stockpile if they dig up a "mine", instead of losing the game, and a flag is lost (and needs to be bought back with coins) if a tile is incorrectly flagged.
- Safecracker has Minesweeper on an in-game computer.
- Sonic Battle has Knuckles' Mine Hunt as an unlockable minigame. It's essentially a Minesweeper clone with you helping Knuckles detect mines in a field.
- World of Mines takes Minesweeper to a global scale by making its boards shaped like real countries and cities. The general formula is the same as the original as you still have to uncover all safe tiles and avoid/flag mines based on numbers on them, but some maps can be even larger than the Expert map (just check out Russia's 2000+ tiles) or have islands that lead to potential guessing. World of Virus replaces mines with viruses and flags with pills, but it's otherwise the same shebang.
