Show HN: The classic Minesweeper on an irregular grid
An experimental take on classic Minesweeper replaces the regular square grid with procedurally generated irregular polygons, forcing players to relearn familiar logic and patterns. Commenters praise the fresh challenge, mobile-friendly design, and quality-of-life features like mass-reveal and undo, while suggesting improvements for touch controls, animations, tutorial layout, and guess-free puzzle generation. Others focus on business and privacy trade-offs, urging an ad-free paid version and more transparent or minimal data collection on mobile.
Controls & Interaction
- Many comments focus on missing or inconsistent “chord” actions (left+right click / middle click / double click) to auto-clear neighbors around a numbered tile.
- Trackpad and touch users struggle with combos like left+right or middle click; suggestions include double-clicking or tapping the number, modifier keys, and formal “no flags / no chord” challenge modes.
- On some browsers and OSes, right-click brings up the browser context menu instead of flagging, breaking the tutorial and gameplay.
- Mobile players like short-tap to reveal and long-press to flag, but report inconsistencies (long-press not working in Android app).
Gameplay Mechanics & Difficulty
- Players appreciate how irregular adjacency (including point-touching neighbors) breaks their old Minesweeper intuition and forces slower, more deliberate reasoning.
- Some find boards too sparse, with fewer high numbers (e.g., no 5s on expert); others experiment with higher mine ratios via custom settings and report a more “expert-like” feel.
- There is recurring interest in fully logic-solvable (no-guess) boards. A solver-based approach from another puzzle collection is referenced as a model.
Grid Design & Generation
- The grid generation is described as triangle-based subdivision and smoothing, inspired by procedural modeling techniques, yielding irregular quads.
- Some want even more irregularity (e.g., spherical/torus surfaces, city maps, aperiodic tilings, Voronoi tesselations); others prefer non-rectangular but regular tilings (hex, etc.).
UI, Animation & Mobile Experience
- Uncover animations feel slow to speed-focused players, especially on small clears; the developer tweaks wave-style timing based on feedback.
- Tutorial dialogs can cover required tiles on small phones (notably iPhone SE), making steps hard or nearly impossible to complete.
- Zoomed play on mobile would benefit from one-finger panning on revealed tiles.
Scores, Modes & Variants
- High-score times, including sub-second beginner clears, prompt discussion of legitimacy and whether requiring all mines to be flagged would reduce suspicious scores.
- Some want options like countdown-style clues (numbers reduced by nearby flags) and auto-marking or auto-revealing unambiguous cells.
- Numerous related games and twists (hex grids, recursive/infinite fields, 3D surfaces, automation-focused variants) are mentioned as comparisons or inspirations.
Bugs & Technical Issues
- Reported issues include: shared URLs not loading the intended board, occasional visual mismatches (missing bevels, mines briefly revealed after undo), ad banners offsetting touch targets, and lack of session persistence in the iOS app.
- Some of these are acknowledged and queued for fixes.