How To Cheat At Minesweeper
Today, I tell you how to cheat at Minesweeper. No, I don’t cheat since I win most of the time. Your [results] may vary, or as they text message, ymmv.
Research. Finally, I know how that kid was cheating at Minesweeper [the free Microsoft computer game] in 1992. He could tell you if a given square was a mine. He told me what to watch for, but not how to set it up. Here is how to do it.
A) Open a new game of Minesweeper. Then click anywhere on the title bar. This is the blue bar at the top of the Minesweeper window that contains the word Minesweeper and the minimum maximum buttons.
B) Just click on it anywhere and nothing apparently happens. Then you type, without the quotation marks, the lower case “xyzzy”.
C) Press and hold shift and then press enter. Release both keys. Nothing apparently happens.
Okay so far? Now look, very, very closely at the upper left-hand corner of your desktop. This is the main screen with all your icons, not the Minesweeper window. Move your cursor over the Minesweeper squares (which are called ‘cells’). You will notice a single pixel in the corner will turn WHITE whenever you are over a cell that does NOT have a mine, and revert to your background color when the cell IS a mine.
It takes a little practice, but the following advice may help. The first cell is never a mine no matter what color the pixel is. The “key” has to be set up each time you open a new Minesweeper session, but lasts for the entire session. Don’t give up, for sometimes the key does not “take”, and you have to re-enter it and test until it works.
To really baffle your audience (or at least an audience that took as long to learn this trick as I did), if you uncover a cell that has a 3 or higher number, bet then you can, in advance, pick which of the surrounding cells contain the mines. I found this information in a book on advanced XP at the Barnes & Noble library. Er, I mean, book store.
[Author's note 2015-03-27: these instructions have been double-checked. If they don't work, you are doing something wrong. Also, this has NOT been tested on the 64-bit on-line version. But what kind of complete moron would play a game where you have to sign in with information that compromises your identity.]
[Author's note 2022: remember this was written in 2005.]
