minefair

An infinite implementation of Minesweeper that runs in the terminal. It's also completely fair.

Fairness

What does being fair mean? minefair doesn't generate mines ahead of time like most Minesweeper implementations. Instead, it only generates the numbers, and a solver evaluates the validity of your moves. That allows some changes to be made to the rules of the game, as we can essentially "move around" the mines based on the player's choices. The game comes with a number of "judges"; algorithms that essentially decide where the mines are actually placed. Judges make a decision when you click about whether there should be a mine under that tile.

There is also an optional flag that will ensure that the generated board is always solvable (i.e. that at any given point there will always be at least 1 tile that is guaranteed not to be a mine).

List of judges

• random - Decides at random based on the probability of the tile being a mine. Acts like the original game.
• global - Accepts any move that has the best probability of being safe across the whole board, but any move with a worse probability will always be a mine.
• local - A more forgiving version of global and the default judge. Acts like global, but only considers logical regions: if some tiles are completely logically indepedent from the tile being clicked (because they are separated by guaranteed mines), they are not considered for the purposes of finding the move with the best probability. While global may punish you for making a slightly risky click because there is a safe tile on the other side of the map, local is more lenient in these scenarios.
• kind - Accepts any move that has a mine probability of less than 1.
• strict - Only accepts moves that have a mine probability of 0.
• kaboom-global (or kaboom) - Imitates the rules of Kaboom, another fair Minesweeper implementation. If there are any tiles that are 100% safe, you must click one of those. Otherwise you can click any tile that isn't guaranteed to be a mine.
• kaboom-local - kaboom-local is to kaboom-global what local is to global. It uses the same rules, but only takes the logical region of the clicked tile into account.

Controls

• Use WASD to pan the camera. The scroll wheel changes the speed. You can also drag with the mouse to pan.
• Left click to reveal a tile.
• Right click flags a tile as a mine.
• Left clicking a number performs the chording action: if the amount of flags around that tile is equal to the number shown, it clears all unflagged tiles around it.
• After dying, you are in a mode which shows which tiles would have been safe to press. You can press j to show the exact risk levels of each tile as hexadecimal digits. Press r to start a new game with the same settings.
• Ctrl+S saves the game. This is also done automatically when closing the game, or after every click if --autosave is passed.

Installation

; cargo install --git https://github.com/LyricLy/minefair minefair

Command line usage

minefair [OPTIONS] [SAVE_PATH] e.g. minefair --judge strict --density 0.3 --solvable --autosave

Flags

• --judge: Pick the judge to use.
• --bounds: Limit the board to a finite rectangle.
• --density: The density of the mines, represented as a probability from 0 to 1.
• --solvable: Ensure solvability without guessing. The game is still fair without this flag, but requires probabilistic play.
• --theme: Choose a colour scheme to use.
  • frappe is the default theme, based on catppuccin.
  • legacy is the old default theme seen in the preview above.
  • microsoft uses the classic Minesweeper colours from the Windows version of the game.
  • colourblind replaces the red-green scale for risk-safety with red-blue.
  • high-contrast makes elements easier to discern. (thanks, qbdp!)
  • black-and-white is in black and white. Not sure why you'd use this one...
• --iconset: Choose which characters are used to represent unrevealed tiles, flags, mines, and safe tiles.
  • ascii, the default, only uses ASCII characters.
  • latin1 uses Latin-1 characters, which are centred better and perhaps easier to see.
  • unicode uses fancy Unicode characters, but might not be to everyone's taste.
• --reset Clear the save file and start from scratch.
• --cheat: See the output from the solver, revealing how safe each square is.
• --autosave: Save automatically after each click. The default is only to save on pressing Ctrl+S or closing the game.

The --judge, --density and --solvable flags will be ignored if the save file already exists.

Saving

The positional SAVE_PATH argument can be used to set the path of the file to use for save data. It can also be set using the MINEFAIR_SAVE environment variable. If neither of these are present, one of the following defaults is used:

• $XDG_DATA_HOME/minefair/save.minefair or ~/.local/share/minefair/save.minefair (Linux)
• ~/Library/Application Support/minefair/save.minefair (macOS)
• %APPDATA%\minefair\save.minefair (Windows)

Pressing Ctrl+S or closing the game with Ctrl+C or Esc will save the game. Revealing a tile will also save if the --autosave flag is passed.