So you’ll die a lot looking for a decent chunk of empty squares to get started on. In this it’s not unlike Minesweeper itself – while Growing Up mode gives you the health mechanic that lets you weather mistakes and even strategically make them to advance your level, here clicking on any monster is an instant game over.
You can and will go dozen games before finding yourself in a viable starting position. Starting a game of BIG (Bomb mode) is like coming ashore in Day Z or landing on the military base in PubG. Join me while I hand over my notes to any brave successors who wish to attempt it, while trying not to compare it to a roguelike. It was to be my character redemption arc, the trophy that established my logic-puzzle credentials among this pre-eminent crowd. I’ve had to give up on my attempt to conquer Minemonster’s BIG (Bomb Mode), the final of its challenges. You can also watch me explain how Tametsi plays in the video below.
HEXCELLS ICON WINDOWS
Tametsi is currently available for Windows on Steam. Just to have my own Miracle Sudoku moment. I do another level, now and again, just to keep my hand in. I find Tametsi levels take me around an hour and this is why I still haven’t finished it. The only fix is to go down the Picross/Sudoku route, dishing out all the information you need at the start – but then it wouldn’t be a minesolver any more.
Tametsi suffers from the same problem that all minesolvers share, that making a mistake reveals information. You might wonder why you’d want a bigger brush, but erasing scribblings is a terrible chore if you don’t enlarge the brush. Tametsi allows you to choose the colour and brush size you draw with but doesn’t restrict your choice, so you never end up using exactly the same colour or size twice. Tametsi is aware of the grind in a tough minesolver and introduces a welcome, compensating measure: you can draw on the grid to keep track of your thoughts. And mentally grinding through those possibilities was neither zen nor invigorating.
HEXCELLS ICON PLUS
The main issue I had with Hexcells Plus is that it introduced a local/aggregate hybrid type of information – the mine count within two cells – that just seemed designed to keep you busy. Tametsi, however, is particularly resistant to speedy resolution: deep analysis is mandatory and it often has you interrogating hypotheses, hoping one of them will take you to a divine reductio ad absurdum. Yet there’s always a point at which the puzzle buckles and delivers victory in a flash flood of revelation that is both cathartic and euphoric. And on you go, fighting through the fog of war, one cell at a time. A Matryoshka of puzzles: within each solved puzzle is a new impossible conundrum. Minesolvers are always about digging into the soil for a logical proof about the state of a cell, any bloody cell, which will then reveal more information. So Tametsi‘s global information will not just tell you the total number of mines but the total number of mines in each colour. But then it also assigns colours to the hidden mines and begins to offer information relating to those colours. Tametsi presents multiple grid types – squares, octagons and all sorts of tessellations. Tametsi has a similar ruleset to Hexcells and, initially, does not seem all that different. And then there is global information which tells you something about the whole board. This is followed by aggregate information which tell you something about a batch of cells for example, Hexcells may tell you how many mines exist in a slice of the grid. Cells offer local information normally, when you click them open, they’ll tell you how many of their neighbours are mined. Minesolvers deal with three types of information. And then there is Tametsi (Grip Top Games, 2017), a game I still have not completed.
I found Hexcells (Matthew Brown, 2013) pretty easy, more of a zen exercise, while the followup Hexcells Plus (Matthew Brown, 2014) turned out to be too laborious for my love. The modern Minesweeper is solvable – hey, let’s call them “Minesolvers “ – and I’ve previously waxed lyrical about one of my faves, the minimalist RYB (FLEB, 2016). Nutshell: Hard Minesweeper with interesting ruleset. And it blows him away after he initially thought it was a joke.Īnd I thought, well, that’s how Tametsi makes me feel. There was some excitement over a Sudoku video last week, the “Miracle Sudoku”, where a handful of arcane rules and just two numbers allows a Sudoku expert to fill the board.
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