While writing a wide-ranging history of Windows Minesweeper for Boss Fight Books in 2023, I ended up playing many variations of Microsoft's beloved original game. Those include versions with hexagonal tiles , versions with weird board shapes , and versions that extend Minesweeper into four dimensions or more , to name just a few.

Almost all these variants messed a little too much with the careful balance of simplicity, readability, reasoning, and luck that made the original Minesweeper so addictive. None of them became games I return to day after day.

But then I stumbled onto Dragonsweeper , a free browser-based game that indie developer Daniel Benmergui released unceremoniously on itch.io last month. In the weeks since I discovered it, the game has become my latest puzzle obsession, filling in a worrying proportion of my spare moments with its addictive, simple RPG-tinged take on the Minesweeper formula.

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