Given the cost of games that take thousands of programmer hours and the cost of similar casual games for Android or the iPhone, even $9.99 for a lifetime license is exorbitant, but $9.99 per year to get rid of the ads? I’m surprised Microsoft has a price tag on such a basic game that used to be free in the OS but to have it be this expensive is just exploitive and disappointing both. You can pay to upgrade the program to skip these ads, but it’s rather stupid expensive:

Notice also that, yes, there are advertisements, even an occasional video advert that takes up the entire screen. The most basic that matches the earlier versions is “Easy 9×9” on the top left, but you can choose 16×16, 30×16 and even make your own custom grid if you want something super easy or super difficult. You can see that there are six ways to play: Four basic grids, an “adventure” game variation and a daily challenge. Launch it by going to the search box on the Taskbar and typing in “minesweeper”. I’ll talk a bit more about it in a moment, but yes, there is a version of Minesweeper included with Windows 10, known as “Microsoft Minesweeper” now and a bit spruced up for the modern OS. Your goal is to identify and flag all the bombs or click and reveal every non-bomb square without a mishap. If you’ve never played, it’s a “find the hidden items” puzzle where you click on squares in a grid to reveal what’s in the square (if it’s a bomb, oops!) and what’s adjacent.

The game itself is pretty simple, however, so it turns out that the play – and strategy – hasn’t changed in all those decades. Those were the early days of Microsoft Windows, no question. In fact, it was first officially released as part of the “Microsoft Entertainment Pack” way back in 1990, and first included in the standard install of Windows 3.1 back in 1992. Though I suspect more people play Solitaire on their PC, Minesweeper has been a part of the Windows experience almost since the very beginning of the first OS release.

Microsoft minesweeper gets hung up