Boom!

Everybody knows that Minesweeper is addictive, but I don’t know how it took so long for somebody to create multiplayer Minesweeper. It’s a standard online Flash game with rooms to play in a chat windows alongside your standard Minesweeper grid. It works exactly as you would think – you and a handful of other players work to clear the grid. The interface is pretty nice – you can see the shadow of other players’ pointers so you can avoid clearing the same cells. If you click a bomb, you are given a penalty – a timeout during which you cannot click. The penalty starts small but grows as you make mistakes, and shrinks again as you play without mistakes. Even with such a minimal interface, there are interesting social dynamics that play out. If you get to the point that there are two cells left to clear, one flag, and a 50/50 shot of being right, you can see people wait and let the person who was most recently working in that area make their guess, and it seems to be an unspoken rule that if you’re that person you step up and guess and take the risk of a penalty. Sure there is the frustration of working along and someone else blowing up the map, but the penalty system actually helps make sure that nobody totally trashes the game. For such a simple thing, it’s really nicely done.