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For a long time, I used minesweeper as my means to cope with extra-inning Sox-Yankees playoff games. I'd get going at my PC and be half-watching baseball and half "saving the world from tiny little mines." It is an addictive if eventually repetitive game. Any potentially novel Minesweeper challenge perks my interest. I was a little disappointed with the MIT mystery hunt minesweeper puzzle Feel Your Way as I jumped at it, and not Pentris, immediately, and the latter felt a lot more fun to me in the final analysis.
Anyway, the point of this entry is that this week's Google Puzzle Challenge is a set of minesweeper variants. If it weren't for the fact I cannot find any way of using my mouse and keyboard to mark flags (maybe its a mac/firefox thing, but I know all the [key]-clicks that should work), this week's challenge would be by far my favorite to date (although the 24 game one did get many of my coworkers doing the 24 challenge for that week).
Most of the variants are quickly identified by their names.
Zeroes is an obvious and immediate throw-away, particularly if the click-clear in the typical MS minesweeper is possible. It adds about as much in challenge to minesweeper as needing to pencil in your whole name and then shade in bubbles for the respective letters does for the SAT. In other words, it just tries your patience.
Spiders seems far too easy although a novel concept that got me trying to "trap" those mines whenever possible. I'll try it with more mines next time - or maybe just aim for a particular shape in the grid to be where all the mines end up and see if I can "round-up" the mines to that place.
Memory is an interesting idea but, without the ability to plant flags, I really can't go farther on it even if I knew where all the mines were.
Symbol reminds me a lot of the Lost Bridges puzzles you can find over at puzzlinks.com in its concept. It seems you either guess lucky early on with what the symbols mean, or you don't and are in big trouble. Minesweeper may not be forgiving enough to make the Symbol variant work well unless you get a little edge of a starting grid given to you. Just an idea....
Knights is likely my favorite idea of the lot as it seems to fundamentally change how you visualize the information you get and so I will definitely be trying this one out again. But not before I figure out how to plant a flag.
Anyway, if you are a recovering minesweeper addict, head over to try this week's puzzle challenge from Wei-Hwa.
Anyway, the point of this entry is that this week's Google Puzzle Challenge is a set of minesweeper variants. If it weren't for the fact I cannot find any way of using my mouse and keyboard to mark flags (maybe its a mac/firefox thing, but I know all the [key]-clicks that should work), this week's challenge would be by far my favorite to date (although the 24 game one did get many of my coworkers doing the 24 challenge for that week).
Most of the variants are quickly identified by their names.
Zeroes is an obvious and immediate throw-away, particularly if the click-clear in the typical MS minesweeper is possible. It adds about as much in challenge to minesweeper as needing to pencil in your whole name and then shade in bubbles for the respective letters does for the SAT. In other words, it just tries your patience.
Spiders seems far too easy although a novel concept that got me trying to "trap" those mines whenever possible. I'll try it with more mines next time - or maybe just aim for a particular shape in the grid to be where all the mines end up and see if I can "round-up" the mines to that place.
Memory is an interesting idea but, without the ability to plant flags, I really can't go farther on it even if I knew where all the mines were.
Symbol reminds me a lot of the Lost Bridges puzzles you can find over at puzzlinks.com in its concept. It seems you either guess lucky early on with what the symbols mean, or you don't and are in big trouble. Minesweeper may not be forgiving enough to make the Symbol variant work well unless you get a little edge of a starting grid given to you. Just an idea....
Knights is likely my favorite idea of the lot as it seems to fundamentally change how you visualize the information you get and so I will definitely be trying this one out again. But not before I figure out how to plant a flag.
Anyway, if you are a recovering minesweeper addict, head over to try this week's puzzle challenge from Wei-Hwa.
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