Three recurring Minesweeper patterns that turn forced guesses into certainties. Learn these and most boards become solvable.
Most Minesweeper boards are not hard — they are just full of patterns you have not learned yet. Three of them account for the majority of situations where players guess instead of deducing.
These are worth memorising outright.
1-2-1 against a wall
Three consecutive unopened cells against a wall, clueed 1, 2, 1 in order. The mine is always in the middle cell, and the two outer cells are always safe.
This is the single highest-value pattern in the game. The 2 accounts for both mines that the two 1s share.
1-1 along an edge
Two adjacent 1s along an edge with three unopened cells in front of them. The outer cell beyond each 1 is safe; the shared middle cell holds the mine only if both 1s have no other candidates.
Resolve it by counting: if either 1 already has a flagged neighbour, the shared cell is safe.
The 1-2 corner reduction
A 1 followed by a 2 at the edge of an opened region: the 2 needs one more mine than the 1, so exactly one of the two cells beyond the 1 is a mine.
This halves your candidate set and usually cascades once you open the resulting safe cell.