Clients which always give openings

Anything to do with minesweeper...
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cros107
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Aug 30, 2016 10:28 am

Clients which always give openings

Post by cros107 »

Are there any you could recommend (or can you make it like that in arbiter)?
I've only beaten expert 3 or 4 times, all of them on minesweeperonline.com. With standalone clients, the 3 recommended ones don't seem to have this option. Is it allowed on the leaderboards? If so, again, are there any legal clients which have this option?

Thanks.
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Tommy
Posts: 257
Joined: Mon Dec 01, 2008 9:22 pm
Location: Vienna

Re: Clients which always give openings

Post by Tommy »

cros107 wrote: Is it allowed on the leaderboards?
cros107 wrote: If so, again, are there any legal clients which have this option?
I'm afraid not - the original Windows Minesweeper (winmine) did not allow this, as it would be quite an advantage.
cros107 wrote: I've only beaten expert 3 or 4 times, all of them on minesweeperonline.com.
cros107 wrote: Are there any you could recommend (or can you make it like that in arbiter)?
Congratulations, that's already quite the achievement!

From what I can tell, Arbiter can't do that even in cheat mode.

Expert can be quite frustrating in the beginning. At your level, you will improve and get new highscores very quickly, so if you want to reduce frustration it is perfectly reasonable not to play on an accepted version in order to improve first!

As far as such non-official versions go, I can highly recommend Simon Tatham's browser-based version and Michael Gottlieb's browser-based clone.

The first of the two will always give you solvable boards (implying that you start with an opening), the second has a game mode that does the same thing.

Simon Tatham's version lets you share board seeds and restart/replay games, while Michael Gottlieb's clone has many other modes/statistics and replicates the standard behavior very precisely. They're both great at what they do (be a puzzle variant and an interesting if insecure clone, respectively).

Good luck, and happy sweeping!
Don't anthropomorphize computers - they don't like it.
cros107
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Aug 30, 2016 10:28 am

Re: Clients which always give openings

Post by cros107 »

Thanks!

Yeah, expert is pretty frustrating. The thing is, every time I get a decent opening, and play fast, I either make a really dumb mistake about 3/4 through, or make a wrong guess at some point. I think I can play reasonably quick (not by this community's standards, but by casual players'). My best int time is 90.74, in which I had an INSANELY lucky start. My beginner PB is 9 seconds, which is ok. It's just expert which I can't get. The lowest minesweeperonline.com time I got was in the mid 400s I believe, and, again, was very lucky. I just can't seem to beat it on MSX.
qqwref
Posts: 125
Joined: Thu Sep 23, 2010 4:17 pm

Re: Clients which always give openings

Post by qqwref »

I think you're focusing too much on a great start. You do want to find some kind of opening within the first few clicks, but (at least in Expert) your time will be determined much more by the layout of the whole board than by the biggest opening or easiest section. And in fact, at your level, you should be focusing on trying to improve your skill rather than going after personal bests. Try to play through every board that you find an opening on (whether it's big or small), and learn more patterns as you go. As you get faster, you will improve your personal best over and over, usually on boards you might not even consider playing through right now.

Then way later, when you care about 3BV and when a second or two's difference in your personal best means a lot to you... then you can try restarting over and over for the best-looking board ;)
NF player. Best scores 1-10-39.
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