Mines.

How it works

You get a grid — the standard board is five by five, so twenty-five tiles — and you choose how many mines are hidden in it. Open a safe tile and your multiplier goes up. Open a mine and the round is over. Cash out whenever you like, and keep whatever the multiplier had reached.

More mines means a faster-climbing multiplier and a shorter expected run. That trade-off is the entire game, and it's priced exactly.

Why the multiplier climbs the way it does

Mines is sampling without replacement — every safe tile you open makes the next one slightly more dangerous, because there's one less safe tile left among the ones you haven't touched. The chance of opening k safe tiles in a row on a board of T tiles with M mines is:

And the multiplier at that point is the fair price of that survival, minus the edge:

Which is the answer to the question everyone asks about Mines. The multiplier rises as you clear tiles because your odds of having got that far are falling — and it rises at exactly the rate that keeps your expected result flat. Every cash-out point on every board is worth the same: your stake times the house edge, negative.

So when should you cash out?

The honest answer nobody wants: it does not matter to your expected result. Cashing at three tiles every round, cashing at ten, or clearing the board — all identical in expectation, all negative by the same fraction.

What it changes is the shape. Cash out early and often for lots of small wins and a gentle curve. Push deep for rare, large payouts and long dry stretches. Both are legitimate ways to spend an evening. Neither is a strategy in the sense of beating anything.

The one genuinely useful discipline: decide the cash-out point before the round starts. Not because it improves the math, but because "just one more tile" is the exact mechanism by which a planned session becomes an unplanned one — and it's the moment the game is designed around.

What people get wrong

"Corners are safer" / "avoid the middle".

Mine positions are generated from the seeds and nonce. There is no spatial pattern, no safe region, and no memory of where mines fell last round. Tile-picking rituals are free to enjoy and worth nothing.

"Three mines with a three-tile cash-out is the sweet spot."

It's a popular rhythm and there's nothing wrong with it — but it isn't a sweet spot, because there is no spot on the whole surface that's sweeter than any other. Put your favourite setup into the calculator alongside a wilder one and compare the expected result line. They match.

"One more tile — I'm on a run."

Each tile you open is genuinely more dangerous than the last, and that danger is already priced into the multiplier you're being offered. A run of safe tiles is not momentum. It's just the part of the distribution you happen to be standing in.

If you're going to play it

• Choose the mine count and the cash-out point together, before the round, and write them down if that's what it takes.
• Fewer mines with a deeper target and more mines with a shallow one can produce similar multipliers by very different routes — the calculator will show you which route you're actually on.
• Clearing a whole board is a genuinely rare event. Put a high mine count into the calculator and look at the survival percentage before you go hunting for that screenshot.

Questions people actually ask

How is the Mines multiplier calculated?

It is one minus the house edge, divided by the probability of having opened that many safe tiles in a row. Because tiles are drawn without replacement, that probability is the product of the shrinking safe-tile fractions, which is why the multiplier accelerates as you clear the board.

When is the best time to cash out in Mines?

Every cash-out point has the same expected result — your stake multiplied by the house edge — so no exit point is mathematically better. Cashing early gives frequent small wins, cashing late gives rare large ones. Decide the point before the round starts, because that is the decision the game is designed to make difficult.

Are some tiles safer than others in Mines?

No. Mine positions come from the server seed, client seed and nonce, with no spatial bias and no relationship to previous rounds. Corners, edges and the centre are all equally likely to hide a mine.

How many mines should I set?

More mines means a faster-climbing multiplier and shorter expected runs; fewer means slower growth and longer runs. Expected value is identical either way, so pick based on the session shape you want rather than on any supposed advantage.

What are the odds of clearing an entire Mines board?

It depends on the mine count, and it falls very fast as mines increase. Enter your board into the calculator on this page and set the safe-tile count to every non-mine tile to see the exact probability for that configuration.