Making Explainable Minesweeper

For what it's worth, the way 14MV does hints is probably by just throwing the board into Z3 (https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3) or some other constraint solver. Microsoft has already done all the hard work for you.

Hello Hacker News!

Thank you for your interest in my previous post. This time, I've written a blog post about the game and the process of creating it.

In the original Minesweeper, there are inevitable 50/50 moments where you have to rely on luck. In the game I created, 'Explainable Minesweeper,' I eliminated these guessing situations. However, I also prevented the maps from becoming too easy! How? By using logical deduction, you can solve puzzles that initially appear to be luck-based. The blog post explains the process in more detail.

The exclusion of patterns that involve more than 2 numbers is a pretty huge caveat that should be mentioned earlier and more clearly. When I was playing a lot of minesweeper, larger levels tended to require solving larger patterns most of the time. If you exclude those solutions, your estimate of how often you are required to guess is going to be pretty inaccurate.