Trap Scout
Every cell either hides a trap or shows a number telling you how many traps are in the 8 cells around it. Use those numbers to work out which cells are safe to open and which ones to flag and leave alone.
Three difficulty levels are available, from a quick 8x8 warm-up to a genuinely tense 12x10 board with 30 traps hidden across it.
How to Play
- Reveal a cell: Left-click or tap
- Flag a suspected trap: Right-click, or long-press for about half a second
- Choose Easy, Med, or Hard before you start
- Reveal every safe cell without opening a trap to win
About This Game
Trap Scout is a classic Minesweeper-style logic puzzle. The board is full of hidden traps; every other cell shows a number from 0 to 8 indicating how many traps are touching it. Flag the cells you're confident hide traps so you don't open them by mistake, and reveal everything else. Open an actual trap and the run ends immediately, with every other trap on the board revealed in red.
Why We Built It
Minesweeper is one of the purest deduction puzzles ever made, but a bad first click can end a run before it even starts, which always felt like an unnecessary source of frustration rather than real difficulty. We wanted to keep everything else about the format untouched — the same number-reading logic, the same flagging and flood-fill reveal — while removing that one source of pure luck. The three difficulty presets exist so newer players can build pattern-reading skill on an 8x8 board before testing it against a denser 12x10 one.
How It Works
Traps aren't placed until after your very first reveal, and the cell you click is always excluded, so the opening move can never end the game. Each non-trap cell's number is calculated by counting how many of its up-to-8 neighbors are traps. Revealing a cell with a count of zero automatically floods open all of its connected zero-count neighbors, clearing large open areas in one click. The timer starts counting up the moment your first reveal happens. You win the instant every non-trap cell is open; opening a trap ends the run and reveals the full trap layout so you can see what you missed.
Tips & Strategy
- Start on Easy to get comfortable reading numbers before moving up — the deduction logic is identical at every difficulty, only the board size and trap density change.
- If a numbered cell's count exactly matches its number of remaining unopened neighbors, every one of those neighbors is guaranteed to be a trap — flag them all immediately.
- Conversely, if a numbered cell already has enough flagged neighbors to satisfy its count, every other unopened neighbor is guaranteed safe to reveal.
- Work outward from the edges of already-opened areas rather than clicking in unexplored open space, since edges give you the most number clues to work with.
Ideas for Improvement
- Chord-click — clicking a satisfied number to instantly reveal all of its remaining safe neighbors at once.
- Over-flag warning — a visual cue if you've flagged more cells in an area than its numbers allow.
- Daily seeded board — the same layout for everyone each day, for comparing times and results.
- Custom board setup — adjustable width, height, and trap count beyond the three fixed presets.