Guides · Minesweeper · 8 min read · 2 October 2026

Minesweeper patterns: 1-1, 1-2, 1-2-1 and 1-2-2-1

Experienced Minesweeper players do not count every tile. They recognise a few shapes of numbers along the edge of the opened area and know immediately which tiles are safe. Four of these patterns cover most of what you will see on any board.

In every diagram below the opened area is at the bottom and the closed tiles at the top. A ? is an opened number that does not affect the pattern. Every marked tile was checked by trying all possible arrangements of mines that fit the numbers - the marked ones are the same in all of them.

Basics: what a number promises

A number tells you how many of its eight neighbours are mines. Two rules follow from that, and every pattern is built from them:

• If a number already touches as many flags as its value, every other closed neighbour is safe.
• If a number has exactly as many closed neighbours as its value, all of them are mines.

The patterns below are what you get when two numbers share some of their neighbours.

1-1 from a wall

This pattern only works when the first 1 is against a wall or a corner, so that it has exactly two closed neighbours. In the middle of a row it says much less. Look for it at the edges of the board and next to tiles you have already proven safe, which act as walls too.

1-2

The 1-2 is the most common pattern on any board and it works anywhere along a straight edge. Read it as: “the 2 gets one mine from the shared tiles at most, so it needs the tile on its other side”.

1-2-1

The 1-2-1 resolves five tiles at once. It is worth remembering as a shape rather than working it out each time: mines above the 1s, safe above the 2.

1-2-2-1

The 1-2-2-1 is the 1-2 pattern applied from both ends: each 1-2 pushes a mine onto the tile above the 2 further in. On the expert board you will see it often along long straight edges.

Reducing numbers

The patterns are not limited to 1s and 2s. Subtract the flags a number already touches: a 3 next to one flag behaves like a 2, a 4 with two flags like a 2. Once you do that automatically, a 2-3-2 in which every number already touches one flag is just a 1-2-1 in disguise, and the same shapes appear everywhere.

The first click on Lynxy

On Lynxy the mines are placed only after your first click, and never on the tile you opened or on any of its eight neighbours. The first tile is therefore always a zero, and the board opens up a pocket instead of a single number. (Only a board too small to keep a 3×3 hole free falls back to protecting just the clicked tile, which never happens on the three standard sizes.)

When you really have to guess

Not every Minesweeper board can be solved by logic. The mines are placed at random, and now and then two tiles end up with exactly the same information about them - the classic 50/50 at the edge. When that happens, a few habits help:

• Make sure it really is a guess. Check the mine counter: near the end of a game the total number of mines left often settles a position that looks like a coin toss.
• Guess early, not late. If a guess is unavoidable, take it while the rest of the board is still unsolved, so a bad outcome costs less time.
• Prefer tiles that tell you something. A tile that, if safe, will open new numbers next to the stuck area is worth more than an isolated corner.

The density of mines also changes with the level, which is why expert feels so much harder than its size alone suggests:

On hard, roughly one tile in five is a mine, so the 50/50s are more common. Getting the patterns right is what keeps them rare.