Neggsweeper, as hopefully you’ve noticed, is nearly identical to Minesweeper, a common game included with Windows operation systems. In this game, you try to locate a number of “bad neggs” using your logic–and often a spot of luck. The objective is to locate all the “bad neggs”, using the ctrl-click command.
It costs 30 neopoints per play, and can win you lots more once you get obsessed (hard to avoid!). The trophy is a…well…pretty lame-looking negg 😛
The best way I can teach how to master Neggsweeper is to give a few common situations. Using these, you should be able to understand the logic necessary and then be able to formulate your own conclusions later on. For starters, choose a few random spots on the map. Hopefully, this will clear away about twenty tiles, more or less depending on your luck. If you unfortunately got a “bad negg”, restart and try again. You will now notice that there are a bunch of tiles with 1’s and 2’s and 3’s…in fact, these numbers can go up to 8, but it’s m most commonly between 1-4. These numbers represent how many “bad neggs” surround that tile horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. (All the tiles without numbers on them are considered cleared, and you won’t have to worry about them). Okay, now for the situations. If these look all messy, copy them into Notepad and use a fixed-width font (such as Courier New) to view them correctly.
O – Represents uncleared tile
X – Represents marked mine
1, 2, 3…etc – Represents corresponding ‘hint’ tile
@ – Represents cleared tile
OO1@
OO1@
111@
@@@@
In this case, would you know what to do?
The lower right ‘1’ can only apply to one uncleared square, so MARK THAT SQUARE AS A MINE BY CONTROL-CLICKING IT.
This also tells you that the lower-left uncleared space is NOT bomb, because the lower left ‘1’ is surrounded by only one bomb. Same with the upper-right uncleared space.
You should mark it as follows:
O@1@
@X1@
111@
@@@@
—————
OOOOO
OOOOO
12321
@@@@@
Becomes:
OOOOO
@XXX@
12321
@@@@@
This is because there are only three uncleared squares surrounding the three, thus they all must be mines. Pretty, simple, huh? But sometimes hard to see, nonetheless.
—————
OOO1@
OOO1@
1221@
@@@@@
Becomes:
OO@1@
@XX1@
1221@
@@@@@
There is only one uncleared square touching the lower-right 1, thus that square must be a mine. After this, the right ‘2’ only has one option for it’s second mine, so ctrl-click that one too.
—————-
OOOOO
O121O
O@@@O
Becomes:
@X@X@
@121@
@@@@@
If the square in the upper-middle was a mine, then any possible explanation would leave one of the ‘1’s surround by two mines.
—————-
There are many more common situations, but I’ll leave it up to you to find them and work them out.
There are also a few special neggs that you can find while sweeping and these will give you huge bonuses, so look forward to them!
Neggsweeper is a fun game, especially for logic geeks like me. Hopefully this guide will help start you off on the right foot! – Kristen