Hex Minesweeper vs Hex Sense vs Triangular Minesweeper
We said it before in this blog that we love Minesweeper since our childhood. For better or worse, it shaped our puzzle taste a lot. So when we made Hex Sense, we made it basically because we love Minesweeper so much and we wanted to have more modern Minesweeper-like games. And after that, when Hex Sense had already gained its audience, we decided that we also need to have a modern version of a hexagonal minesweeper. And of course, we built it, and you know this game, Hex Minesweeper.
If you read our blogs, you are also familiar with What prompted us to build a hexagonal minesweeper? A lot of players who played Hex Sense really enjoy the minesweeper logic on the hexagonal field, but they didn’t really need any story attached to it. They were asking whether we happened to have the hexagonal minesweeper without any additional story or character or any additional gameplay layered on top of it. And this is why we just built hexagonal minesweeper. It was very easy. We kept the logic from Hex Sense and removed everything else.
The next minesweeper
But now we want to go a step further. We see that players love Hex Minesweeper, and we see that they play it a lot. We get a lot of positive feedback about it, so we started thinking: Is there another Minesweeper-like game that we should build?
And because we don’t like to think for too long and it’s easier to build something, we decided that the next game that we will build will be triangular minesweeper.
Twelve adjacent tiles
But as soon as we started building, we found one problem with the shape of the field that gives you a triangular board. The thing is that in the triangular minesweeper, there are 12 adjacent tiles to any of the tiles in the middle of the board, which is a crazy high number for us. And when we tried building several Triangular Minesweeper boards and playing with them, it appeared that it’s much harder than in hexagonal or classic Minesweeper to keep all these adjacent tiles in the head while making the decision. We realised that we often made a mistake not because we didn’t know, but just because, visually, it was very hard to remember all the places that we needed to take into account while making a logical decision. We made a very simple correction, which actually made the gameplay better. When you hover the mouse over any open or unopened tile, it will highlight not only this tile, but also the surrounding tiles, the ones that are adjacent to it.
This made the game easier, but still, even with the current logic, there were a lot of situations where the field would appear too complex. We need to revisit the whole algorithm in the hexagonal minesweeper to make every field solvable from any place you start. So it doesn’t matter where you click on the field as your first move. From that very first move, if you use logic, then you will succeed in the game for sure.
Numbers and flags
So what we kept from Minesweeper is basically the numbers. The clue system is exactly the same as in Minesweeper. An open tile shows the number, and the number describes how many hazardous tiles are around this tile. From that fact, you can deduce which tiles are safe to open and which are not. As we said above, the only difference from classical and hexagonal Minesweeper was the number of adjacent tiles, and in case of triangular Minesweeper, there are 12, and just in time, which is a lot.
Of course, we also left the possibility to flag the tile. I think that the harder the game becomes, the more important the flag option becomes, because it is really, really helpful to think once, mark the tile, and then never think about it ever again.
No hero, just the puzzle
For now, we don’t have any hero or story in this game because we think it should be fun to play as it is. Also, honestly, probably not a lot of people will play it, just because I think Minesweeper itself (classical and hexagonal Minesweeper) is quite a hard game, and not a lot of people can learn to play it. Triangular Minesweeper is even more challenging and even more complex. So for now, it will stay like this, just as pure gameplay. And we plan to release it in the upcoming months.
What do you think? Is it too hard? Should we focus on some easier games, or do you think it’s just difficult enough for Minesweeper lovers? Let us know. Tell us in our Discord server, we read everything there. And meanwhile you can try our Minesweeper-like games here:
Written by
Ana