Your first click decides how much of the board you get for free. Here is where to click, and how to read the opening that follows.
In Minesweeper the first click is the only completely safe click you get, and it is also the one that determines whether the rest of the board is a puzzle or a guessing game.
A good opening hands you a large contiguous region to reason from. A bad one leaves you with isolated pockets and forced guesses.
Click in the interior, not on an edge
A click near the middle has eight neighbours and the largest chance of opening a cascade that spreads. A corner click has three neighbours and almost always gives you a small, cramped opening.
On the PlayJoy daily board the interior click opens a usable region roughly twice as often as a corner click.
Read the cascade before you click again
After the opening, stop. The border of the opened region is where every safe deduction lives, and clicking randomly inside it destroys the information you were just given.
Work the border systematically: find a numbered cell whose remaining mines are fully accounted for by its flagged neighbours, then open everything else around it.
Learn the two patterns that end most boards
The 1-2-1 pattern against a wall always has its mine in the middle position, and the 1-1 pattern along an edge resolves from the outside in. These two cover the majority of late-board decisions.
Everything else on a fair board reduces to counting: if a cell shows three and you have flagged three of its neighbours, every other neighbour is safe.
FAQ
What if the board forces a guess?
Take it. On a fair board a genuine 50/50 is rare, and when it appears the correct play is to guess quickly rather than burn the timer — our scoring penalises elapsed time.