From what I’ve seen, you never start the game by clicking on a mine. So is the map of mines determined by where you click first?
You need to play it a bit more!! This has quite often happened to me - true, most of the time, you click on an open space, but there are only 99 mines in 480 spaces (on expert), so that is just a 20% chance of hitting a mine…
Gp
I put it on custom mode. 8x8 square, 49 mines. I still havn’t clicked on a mine on the first try yet, and I’ve tried at lest 40 times.
There’s a 76% chance of landing on a mine on the first try if the mines were placed randomly, but I havn’t landed on one. Not one.
Hmm, interesting. I never noticed that before.
My brother spotted this a couple of years ago. It must be that the grid isn’t determined until you’ve made your first move.
I play with the “Big Grid” - max custom size, and 200 mines. Nearly impossible to get out. I’ve done it three, maybe four times in my life.
If you set the custom version to have exactly one fewer mine than there are spaces in your grid, you’ll still never click on a mine your first try. I did it once just to find out what color an 8 was (it’s black), but then, I’ve always taken far too strong an interest in all things minesweeper. (I got my time down to 78 seconds on expert a couple of months ago. Oh, the things I feel the need to brag about!)
Yeah, I just tried the same thing, with the same result. However, I seem to recall that at some point you could click on a mine on your first try.
Could this be a more recent development? I don’t have any windows 98 or 95 (or 3.1) machines around to try on, just 2000 and XP.
I also think that they made the solitaire game in Windows CE easier somehow. I can usually win once out of every 5-6 games or so on my HP Jornada, whereas on the PC, in Eric’s Solitaire on the Mac, or in real life I very, very rarely win.
:: bowing, kissing GilaBs feet::
I have found a master. I have only come under 100sec three times, and the best was 89 seconds.
How do you do that? My version doesn’t seem to allow that. For example, in an 8X8 grid (64 spaces), it only allows a maximum of 49 mines. Do you have a special setting that allows you to have one less mine than spaces on the board?
Maybe it’s just that I have a different version (win 98), though.
Agreed - I have experinced hitting mines on the first go, but that was back in the days of 3.1 - now I have graduated to Freecell!! 
Gp