Today's Best — Intermediate

#	Name	Time	Board	Mines	3BV	3BV/s	Eff	Date	Board
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Welcome to Lady Di's Mines

Minesweeper.org has been serving the classic Minesweeper game since 1999. Play beginner, intermediate, expert, or custom boards — all free, no download required. Challenge yourself against the daily leaderboard or set a personal best.

Intermediate Minesweeper — 16×16, 40 Mines

Intermediate is where Minesweeper stops being a tutorial and starts being a game. The board grows to 16×16 with 40 mines — more than four times the area of Beginner, with a mine density that climbs to roughly 15.6%. Deduction chains stretch across multiple rows. Patterns that worked in isolation on a 9×9 grid now overlap and interact. The difficulty jump is real, and it's where most players plateau.

What Changes at Intermediate

Longer deduction chains. A constraint at one edge of the board can propagate across five or six cells before resolving. You need to hold more state in your head simultaneously.
More dense number walls. With more mines per area, you'll see more 2s, 3s, and 4s packed together. Reading overlapping clues — figuring out which mines are shared between two constraints — is the core skill here.
50/50 situations appear more often. At higher density, isolated two-cell ambiguities arise more frequently. No Guess mode eliminates these if you want a pure logic challenge.
Opening cascades are smaller. The higher mine density means the safe open region is smaller on average. You'll spend more time on constrained deduction rather than free exploration.

Strategy for Intermediate

Master the 1-2 pattern. A 1 adjacent to a 2 sharing one unknown neighbor means the 2's other unique neighbor is a mine. This pattern appears constantly at intermediate density.
Work the edges early. Edge cells have fewer neighbors, making their constraints tighter and easier to resolve. Clearing the borders first opens safe interior territory.
Track mine counts globally. Forty mines is a lot to track, but if you've flagged 35, only 5 remain. That global constraint can resolve ambiguous clusters that local reasoning can't crack.
Use chord clicks aggressively. Speed matters. Once a number is satisfied, double-click to auto-reveal neighbors instead of manually clicking each one.
Don't over-flag. Every flag is a right-click and potentially a wasted left-click. Fast players at this level flag only when they need the visual marker to complete a deduction chain.

Beginner vs. Intermediate vs. Expert

Beginner — 9×9, 10 mines (~12.3% density). Learn fundamentals, chase sub-10s personal bests.
Intermediate (this page) — 16×16, 40 mines (~15.6%). The standard skill checkpoint. Sub-60s is respectable; sub-30s is strong.
Expert — 30×16, 99 mines (~20.6%). The definitive benchmark. World-record territory is under 40 seconds.

Related Modes

Cylinder Intermediate — 16×16, 40 mines, but left and right edges connect. Same density, different topology.
Toroid Intermediate — All four edges connect. No borders at all.
Hexsweeper Intermediate — The intermediate board on a hexagonal grid.
Tentaizu — A Japanese deduction puzzle with all clues pre-placed. No guessing, ever. New puzzle daily.

Minesweeper Intermediate — 16×16, 40 Mines