It's a game that I really enjoy and can easily get stuck in for an hour due to its strategic nature and addictive replayability. It's also brilliantly simple. But something really sticks out to me that is holding me back from just, remaking it.

No one knows how to play it.

Obviously that's an exaggeration but I am SHOCKED by how many people don't know how to play minesweeper, but it also makes total sense. Why ARE there numbers?! What do they mean? In context to explosive mines they appear to have absolutely no correlation.

As much as I love the game, no one understands it at a glance, and numbers are a kind of stupid way to deliver the only crucial information in game. Example 1 shows just how erroneous they actually are.

Also, numbers higher than 4 serve as almost no challenge at all.

Example 2 shows a demonstration of multiple things:

• I want to use a visual indicator as opposed to numbers. This won't be colours most likely, it'll be some kind of terrain malformation or something easily identifiable as "dangerous". Numbers will still be available for accessibility.

• I want to increase the actual challenge and problem solving by reducing the number of mines around any given tile to below 5. This means you'll actually have to deduce what tiles are "mines", and it also reduces the number of indicators you'll have to learn.

This is obviously a precarious goal; simplifying an already simple game that is well-understood by many by reducing its core mechanics in an attempt to make it more understandable. It's a slippery slope of garrulity. But I think the numbers do a deal of damage to the game's immediate visual readability and the game is too easy with occurrences of higher numbers of mines.

Once I get more feedback on my thoughts I will talk more about what game I want to make with this.