The Esstu Pack

Mines

Ever played the standard Windows Minesweeper and, after locating 97 of the mines, find that you can't be sure which of the last four squares has a mine? And then you click on one of them and die because you guessed wrong? Try this instead. Every game is guaranteed solvable!

Before giving you any game, Mines will solve it - if it can't, then it tries again. Note that this can take a long time on highest difficulty (up to 30 seconds on a 1GHz computer); if you can't be bothered waiting, use Task Manager to kill Mines.EXE. (It's not slow. It actually generated and tests a large number of games in that time - easily 15,000 - before finding one that can be solved.) Note that "Difficult" is significantly harder than "WinMine Difficult", which is a layout to imitate Difficult mode in Windows Minesweeper.

"Be Nice" mode gives you an extra chance at life when you die :D

If you get stuck, click on "Hint" to have the AI do something for you. This carries a small score penalty.

High scores are stored in "mines.dat" in the program's directory. It is text, but don't edit it :)

Planned improvements: Game generation on another thread; better display.

File: MINES.ZIP, 45KB - current version 1.1.3
Requires: Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP (tested with XP but should work on any 32-bit Windows)
Installation: Unzip
Operation: Run.
De-installation: Delete mines.exe and mines.dat
Distribution: Emailware.