Really a classic game. Most people have been exposed to it at some point, probably from pre-10 Windows, or from looking up "Minesweeper" on Google, or something like that. Most people don't get much into it though. It seems like a lot of people I've mentioned it to think of it as an intimidating game with numbers, and that's about it. I like puzzles, I like speed-based games, and I like increasing my pattern recognition, so really it's a no-brainer for me to want to play it. I'm about at 3000th worldwide on minesweeper.online (out of almost 6 million), which is pretty good I think.
Here are my main times:
Made by a lone New Zealand developer over at Incandescent Games, Globesweeper is an awesome spin on Minesweeper. Basically, imagine regular Minesweeper, but on a sphere you can rotate around. So, that means no edges, it all just loops over. Pretty cool, I think. I became a lot more into it with the Triangle mode, where each tile borders like 11 others (because just corners touching counts, of course), so it is a lot more complicated than the Classic mode (normal Minesweeper with squares) in a pretty fun way. There's also Hexagon mode, which is really easy, but still fun to give a bit of time. I've played a lot of Globesweeper in the past couple years, and I like to think I'm one of the best players around. I prefer it to the original game by now.
Here's a hastily pasted-in spreadsheet table of my rankings in-game, and on speedrun.com (labelled as "SR"):
| A | B | C | D | E | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Shape | Size | Mines | In-Game Rank | SR Rank |
2 | Triangle | Small | Standard | 1 | 1 |
3 | Dense | 1 | 1 | ||
4 | Insane | 2 | 1 | ||
5 | Medium | Standard | 5 | 1 | |
6 | Dense | 8 | 1 | ||
7 | Insane | 40 | |||
8 | Large | Standard | 16 | ||
9 | Dense | ||||
10 | Insane | ||||
11 | Huge | Standard | |||
12 | Dense | ||||
13 | Insane | ||||
14 | Colossal | Standard | |||
15 | Dense | ||||
16 | Insane | ||||
17 | Classic | Small | Standard | 1 | 1 |
18 | Dense | 2 | 1 | ||
19 | Insane | 1 | 1 | ||
20 | Medium | Standard | 3 | 1 | |
21 | Dense | 1 | 1 | ||
22 | Insane | 2 | 2 | ||
23 | Large | Standard | 4 | 1 | |
24 | Dense | 1 | 1 | ||
25 | Insane | 12 | |||
26 | Huge | Standard | 10 | ||
27 | Dense | ||||
28 | Insane | ||||
29 | Colossal | Standard | 13 | ||
30 | Dense | ||||
31 | Insane | ||||
32 | Hexagon | Small | Standard | 7 | 1 |
33 | Dense | 11 | 1 | ||
34 | Insane | 6 | 1 | ||
35 | Medium | Standard | 10 | 2 | |
36 | Dense | 12 | 1 | ||
37 | Insane | 10 | 1 | ||
38 | Large | Standard | 11 | 1 | |
39 | Dense | 11 | |||
40 | Insane | 4 | |||
41 | Huge | Standard | 159 | ||
42 | Dense | ||||
43 | Insane | ||||
44 | Colossal | Standard | 37 | ||
45 | Dense | ||||
46 | Insane |
A spinoff of Globesweeper, Hex Puzzler is an awesome puzzle game that adds a bunch of complicated rules to the original Globesweeper in a series of increasingly larger and more difficult pre-determined levels (as opposed to the randomly generated boards in normal Minesweeper and the original Globesweeper). I won't get into these individual rules, but do check it out.
The Minesweeper game that originally got me into Minesweeper. It can be found on my friend Michael's awesome site 2020os (which I should probably make a page talking about, come to think of it). It's basically a clone, but has a difference with the win condition. In normal Minesweeper, you can complete a game without flagging a single bomb. Clearing all of the safe tiles is enough to win. In Defuser, the opposite is true. You have to flag every single bomb, and can leave safe tiles uncleared. I had fun getting a lot of the top times on Defuser, and talking with my friends over there back in the day. Good game, great site. Do give it a chance.