Mines

How to play

The board is a 5×5 grid of 25 face-down tiles, some hiding mines and the rest gems. You decide how many mines go in, you decide how far to push, and you decide when to take the money.

Before a round you set two things:

• Mines: the row of buttons offers 1, 3, 5, 10 or 24. This is the only difficulty setting, and it changes everything about how the round feels.
• Bet: tap chips (10, 50, 100 or 500) onto the bet spot. Bets go in steps of 10, from 10 up to 1,000. Clear empties the spot and Rebet repeats your last stake.

Press Start. The mines are scattered at random across the grid and stay put for the rest of the round. Now tap any tile:

• A gem lights up and the multiplier climbs.
• A mine explodes, the bet is lost, and the whole board flips over so you can see where every mine was.

Once you have at least one gem, the big button turns into Cash out with the exact amount written on it. Press it and the round ends with your bet times the current multiplier. If you find every gem on the board, the game pays you automatically.

Above the grid, the panel keeps three numbers in view: the Multiplier you’d collect right now, the Next tile value with the percentage chance that tile is safe, and your Gems count.

How the multiplier is built

Every multiplier is the fair price of surviving that many picks, cut by 3%. With m mines and k gems found, the fair price is C(25, k) ÷ C(25 − m, k), the number of ways to pick k tiles from the grid divided by the number of ways to pick them all from the safe ones. The game multiplies that by 0.97 and rounds down.

Some real values from the game:

Notice how the 1-mine and 24-mine boards meet at the same number. Clearing all 24 gems with one mine and finding the single gem among 24 mines are the same 1-in-25 event, so they pay the same ×24.25.

A useful landmark: with 3 mines, five gems in a row happens just under half the time (about 49.6%) and pays ×1.95. Call it a coin flip for nearly double.

The odds and the return

The chance that the next tile is safe is simply the safe tiles left over the tiles left. With 5 mines on a fresh board, the first tap is safe 20 times in 25, or 80%. After three gems it’s 17 in 22, about 77%. The odds slide against you slowly with each gem, which is exactly why the multiplier speeds up.

Because each multiplier is 97% of the fair price, the expected return is 97% of your bet whatever you do: any mine count, any number of gems, any moment of cashing out. The house edge is a flat 3% before rounding.

Rounding is the one thing that moves this. Payouts are whole credits, rounded down. On a 10-credit bet with 1 mine, the first two gems are worth ×1.01 and ×1.05, which both round down to exactly 10 credits. Cash out there and you’ve only got your stake back. That’s why the worst case at 10 credits is around 91%, while at 100 credits it stays above 96%.

Strategy

Nothing you choose beats the 3% edge, so think of the settings as a way to pick the shape of your results:

• 1 or 3 mines gives long, steady rounds. You’ll cash out most of the time, for small amounts.
• 10 mines is a sprint. Three gems already pays ×4.90, but the first tile is only 60% safe.
• 24 mines is one tap, about a 4% shot at ×24.25.
• Avoid tiny bets on low mine counts if you plan to cash out early. The rounding eats the first gem or two.
• Tile choice doesn’t matter. Corners, edges and the centre all carry the same chance; the mines don’t follow a pattern.
• Set a stop point before you start, like “3 mines, 5 gems, cash out”. The Next tile panel makes it tempting to go one more.

For a similar cash-out game with fewer choices per step, try Tower Climb. Keno is a calmer way to pick squares.

If you enjoy Mines, try Mini Baccarat or Mini Roulette next.