Clear the grid without hitting a mine, and here every board can be solved by logic alone, no luck.
Reveal cells to uncover the field. Each opened number tells you how many mines sit in the eight cells around it; use those counts to deduce where the mines are. Flag the mines and reveal every safe cell to win. Hit a mine and the run ends, but on these boards you'll never have to guess.
Who made Minesweeper is genuinely contested, and the contest is worth laying out rather than resolving. The Microsoft version, written by Robert Donner and Curt Johnson, first appeared in 1990 in the Windows Entertainment Pack.
It did not appear from nowhere. Ian Andrew's Mined-Out, written for the ZX Spectrum in 1983, had already put a player on a minefield with numeric proximity warnings, and Andrew has said Microsoft copied it. Johnson has said the design was borrowed from another game, while denying it was that one.
What is not in dispute is what the bundling did. Shipping with Windows turned a minority puzzle into one of the most-played games ever written — to the point that a campaign group spent the early 2000s petitioning Microsoft to remove it.
Minesweeper is the classic mine-finding logic puzzle, rebuilt so every board is solvable without guessing. Free to play in your browser, made in-house at PlayPendium.