We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

A generation of Windows users spent time productively by running Minesweeper, a standard inclusion with Windows from the days of Windows 3.0 through Windows 7, until they decided that it Must Be Monetized, and switched out for a free-to-play, ad-riddled version of the loathed Microsoft Store, just one of thousands of little crappages that have made up, and continue to comprise, the enshittification of tech.

Well, there are other ways to play Minesweeper that don’t require tithing your attention to the marketing department of Microsoft. An open-source version for many platforms is included in Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection, a collection that’s playable for many platforms including web browsers, and which is still one of the great unknown treasures of the internet. (If you’re running Linux, you might be able to find it in your distribution as Mines.) There’s another free version for Linux and Windows called LibreMines that can be found on Git, and KMines for KDE.

In the past week there’s been released on itch.io a fantasy version called Dragonsweeper, which has several interesting innovations. It was inspired by Hojamaka’s Mamono Sweeper (Japanese), as as Hempuli’s Mamono Mower. Hempuli (the creator of Baba Is You and a whole host of Sokoban-inspired puzzles) also made Cavern Sweeper, which I believe I’ve linked to before.

But probably the ultimate in this category is still the 12-year-old Desktop Dungeons, which is commercial but well worth it, and its 3D remake Desktop Dungeons Rewind.

Every game linked here is worth it. To call one out specifically, Desktop Dungeons has great depths that’ll take you many play sessions to uncover.

All of these games involve hidden terrain that hides things that are dangerous, but let you deduce their position using clues in the squares. Many of them let you fight back against those things, if you manage the level of danger you face. Desktop Dungeons changes that a bit by letting you see monsters freely without danger, but also making unrevealed squares themselves a resource that you must manage, since exploring them helps you up and restores your magic, but at the cost of also healing any monsters you’ve wounded without killing them.

Dragonsweeper is current quite the indie darling. It hides both monsters and mines in the unrevealed squares, although the mines are worth 100 threat points each so their numbers can’t be confused with those of the other monsters. It also has special generation quirks for several of the monster types, and once you understand them it makes the game considerably easier (although, like classic Minesweeper, once in a while you’re still forced into guessing).

There is a complete solved playthrough of Dragonsweeper on itch.io’s Youtube channel (11 minutes), but for a change I’m not going to embed it, as it will probably spoil some of the finer points of playing it, and in a real since, learning how to play a game like Dragonsweeper is the real fun of it, and not just the execution of a strategy that’s handed to you. So go and try it yourself, and don’t sweat the inevitable lost games! You’ll be picking up essential information for when you do start winning, and besides, losing reveals the whole map, and that has much to teach you about how the monsters hide.

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Somehow though, he keeps making interesting new things! Most recently there’s Babataire, a variant of Spider Solitaire that uses Baba characters for cards (it’s fun!), Babataire Ex, a variant of the variant that also uses Baba Is You’s rule-modification mechanic (and that, honestly, I can’t make much sense of), and Cavern Sweeper.

Cavern Sweeper is really good! It’s a generalization of Minesweeper where the mines not only have different values, casting varying amounts of danger into the adjacent squares, but where, on harder difficulties, different kinds of mines can even have differently-shaped danger zones.

In the easiest version, all monsters have a diamond-shaped peril region around them with a value from one to three. The number in a space is the sum of all the danger spread into them. Harder versions also add slimes, which have the traditional square-shaped Minesweeper danger zone, ghosts with plus-shaped areas, and optionally serpents with X-shaped zonas de peligro.

To make up for the added uncertainty, you’re granted two additional helps. First, as you mark spaces (you must select the proper kind of monster in the space for it to count), the numbers are subtracted from the nearby regions, decreasing the chaos around it, and any impossible situations are marked for you. And you’re allowed two extra misses before you’re actually in danger of losing the game.

Cavern Sweeper is a fine addition to the genre of Minesweeper variants, and I rather think I prefer it to the original.

Cavern Sweeper (itch.io, browser-playable, $0)

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