Mines

Overview

Mines is a casino take on Minesweeper. A 5x5 grid contains a chosen number of "mines"; the remaining squares are "gems." You reveal squares one at a time. Each gem reveal increases your potential payout; revealing a mine ends the round and you lose. Cash out at any point to lock in your current multiplier. House edge of ~1% in fair implementations.

How to play

Choose how many mines to place on the 5x5 grid (between 1 and 24). The site randomly hides them. Click squares to reveal gems. Each gem revealed multiplies your current potential payout by (25 − N + 1) / (gems_remaining − mines), where the formula is calibrated for a small house edge. Cash out at any moment to receive your bet × current multiplier. Click a mine and lose everything.

Optimal strategy

Pre-commit a target multiplier (or equivalently, a target gem count) before starting. Cash out the instant you hit it; do not get greedy. Like all variance games, the math is the same regardless of target — what changes is the distribution of outcomes. Higher mine counts have rarer wins but bigger payouts per cell. The most popular setting (3 mines, target 3-5 gems) has a clean low-variance profile suitable for casual play.

The math behind the house edge

With M mines on a 25-cell grid, revealing the n-th cell pays multiplier (25 − M − (n − 1)) / (25 − M − n + 1) × (1 − h) × prior multiplier. The cumulative payout after revealing k cells without hitting a mine is approximately C(25, k) / C(25 − M, k) × (1 − h). For 3 mines and 5 cells revealed: ~1.95x payout on a 1% edge implementation. For 10 mines and 5 cells revealed: ~9.6x — much higher variance.

Origin & history

Mines mimics Minesweeper, a Windows-era classic, repackaged as a casino multiplier game. Crypto casinos popularized it in 2019-2020.

Payout table