Basic Mine Sweeping Skills

You need to master two basic skills:

1) Find out the only possible positions of the mines from a certain number:

For the following case:



Only one covered tile is adjacent to the circled tile, and therefore that covered tile must contain a mine:




2) When all mines from a certain number are found, clear all remaining tiles:

For the following case:



You have already found the mine for the circled tile, and therefore all remaining tiles must be safe:

The advanced skills involve some logical thinking, for example:



Looking at the number 2 alone, there are three cases:





But the number 1 shows that the third case is impossible, and therefore there are two cases left:




For both cases, the leftmost tile contains a mine, and therefore you can be sure that the first tile contains a mine:



Another way of thinking is that if the first tile does not contain a mine, then the remaining two tiles must contain mines. But this is impossible as the number 1 will be violated. Therefore you can conclude that the leftmost block must contain a mine.

Moving on, the number 2 shows that the circled tiles contain only one mine:



So the mine corresponding to the number 1 must be one of the two circled tiles, and so the remaining tile must be safe:

When you see the following patterns, you can quickly find out the solution:

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