No-Guess Minesweeper
Play Minesweeper boards that are checked for a complete deduction path from the actual protected opening. The generator does not merely guarantee that the first click is safe. It rejects layouts that force the verifier to stop and guess later.
Safe first click vs. no-guess board
These two ideas are different. A safe-first-click generator can promise that your opening is not a mine, or even that the surrounding cells are empty, while still creating an ambiguous position later. In an ambiguous position, two or more mine arrangements fit every visible clue, so choosing between them is probability rather than deduction.
No-guess Practice adds a second gate. It generates the full mine layout after you choose the opening, calculates every clue, reveals the protected opening region, and then asks the same deterministic solver used by release QA to proceed from only the visible information.
What the verifier is allowed to use
The solver starts with the classic local rules. If a revealed clue already has all of its mines flagged, every other covered neighbor is safe. If the number of covered neighbors exactly equals the number of mines still required by that clue, those covered neighbors are mines.
When neither simple rule moves the board forward, the solver compares clue constraints. If one covered-neighbor set is a strict subset of another, subtracting the smaller clue requirement from the larger can prove that the difference contains zero mines, or that every cell in the difference is a mine. This subset reasoning handles many positions that look stuck when each clue is considered alone.
How a Practice board is accepted
Your first Reveal chooses the start cell. The eight surrounding positions are protected too when they exist, producing a zero opening rather than a single isolated safe square. A seeded pseudo-random generator then places the requested 10, 40 or 99 mines outside that safe zone. The verifier flood-reveals the start exactly as the game would and repeatedly applies forced safe and forced mine deductions.
If the verifier reaches a state with covered cells remaining but no forced move, that candidate is discarded. A new candidate is generated from the next deterministic attempt. Only a board where every non-mine cell can be revealed without a guess reaches the player. The on-screen Generator metric shows how many candidate attempts were needed, so the process is visible rather than described as mysterious “smart” generation.
Because the candidate sequence comes from the Practice seed, difficulty and chosen starting cell, shared setup parameters can reproduce the same accepted layout. Daily mode fixes the date and start as well, making its board identity deterministic.
Logic Hint explains instead of silently playing
A learning-oriented hint should show why a move is safe, not just expose a random square. Logic Hint runs the current visible position through the deduction layer. When it finds a forced safe square or forced mine, it highlights that cell and explains the clue relationship. The hint does not click or flag the cell for you.
Using a hint disqualifies the run from clean personal-best status, but the board remains fully playable. That boundary lets a player learn from a difficult frontier without pretending the assisted time is directly comparable with an unassisted clear.
Chording is part of the skill ceiling
Once a revealed number touches the required number of flags, chording that number opens all other covered neighbors together. Correct chording reduces repetitive clicks and is central to faster traditional play. Wrong flags remain dangerous: the chord trusts your flags, so a misplaced marker can expose a mine.
The board counts actions and reports 3BV per second plus local efficiency after a clear. Those numbers make repeat practice more informative, while the wording stays deliberately local because external competitive sites can use different timing, replay and click-count rules.
Beginner, Intermediate and Expert are not different rule sets
All three levels use the same deduction verifier and controls. Beginner is 9×9 with 10 mines, giving short boards where individual clue rules are easy to see. Intermediate is 16×16 with 40 mines and produces broader frontiers where chording and constraint comparison matter more. Expert is the traditional 30×16 field with 99 mines and is the densest test of scanning, flag discipline and efficient openings.
On a phone, the Expert board does not force the whole page wider than the screen. The minefield lives inside its own scroll region with explicit touch tools. A Compact cells option gives a wider overview, while the default size favors reliable taps. Root-page horizontal overflow is treated as a release failure.
What this mode does not claim
No-guess verification means the included generator found a deduction path under its stated rule set. It does not claim that there is only one human solving style, that every move is immediately obvious, or that your local 3BV/s is an official world record. The goal is narrower: remove forced coin-flip endings while preserving the logic and speed depth that make Minesweeper replayable.
All generation, verification, play state, Daily history and personal bests run in the browser. There is no server leaderboard, account, database or paid solver API behind the result.
Train the deduction patterns directly
The V0.146 Pattern Academy adds 88 verified states across direct safe/mine moves plus reduced 1–1 and 1–2 families, with a separate local Efficiency Lab for 3BV/s, action efficiency and chord yield.