How to play

Donpa Squad is Minesweeper: a hidden minefield, numbers that tell the truth, and one wrong tap. This is the long version of the in-app guide (the ? on the home screen) — same rules, more room to explain why.

The goal

Open every tile that isn’t a mine. Each revealed number counts the mines touching that tile — including diagonals on square boards, or the six neighbours on a Hive board.

Here the open tiles say everything: the 2 touches more mines than the 1s, and all of them can only be talking about the hidden column. Every deduction in the game is this same move, repeated: what do the numbers force?

Your first dig of a game is always safe — it opens a starting region, never a mine.

Dig and flag

The corner toggle switches what a tap does:

• Dig opens the tile. This is the move that wins — and loses — games.
• Flag plants a marker on a suspected mine. Flags are your notes: the board never checks them, they can be wrong, and you can clear them freely.

A long-press does the other one — flag in Dig mode, dig in Flag mode (on a revealed number it chords, like a tap). On a Mac, right-click is the same “other action”, so the toggle effectively assigns your two mouse buttons: Dig mode gives the classic left-to-dig, right-to-flag.

You never have to flag. The win condition is opening every safe tile, so a flagless game is not just possible but a recognized feat (see Decorations in the Service Record).

Prefer a maybe-state? An optional ? mark (Settings → Question marks) turns the flag cycle into flag → ? → clear. A ? is only a note: it never counts toward the mine counter and never satisfies a number for chording.

Playing with a keyboard

On a Mac — or an iPad/iPhone with a hardware keyboard — the whole game plays without a pointer: the arrow keys or WASD move a board cursor, Return digs (or chords a revealed number), F flags, Space switches dig/flag, and Esc pauses. Every menu and screen navigates the same way — Tab moves between control groups, arrows within one — and ⌘/ opens the full shortcut reference in the app.

Chording

The speed technique. When a revealed number already has exactly that many flags beside it, tapping the number itself opens all of its remaining neighbours at once.

The 1s are satisfied by the flag, so chording them sweeps the rest of the column in one tap. The bargain: a chord trusts your flags. If the flag was wrong, the chord opens the mine — and the mistake was the flag, planted seconds earlier, not the tap.

The mine counter

The counter in the top bar is mines minus flags — how many mines you haven’t marked yet. It trusts your flags unconditionally, right or wrong, which makes it a planning tool rather than an oracle: if it reads 2 with three hidden tiles left, you know something about those tiles.

Winning and losing

• Win: open the last safe tile. Flags don’t need to be placed (or correct) — clearing is what counts.
• Lose: dig a mine. The game ends on the spot, but your cleared percentage still goes on the record — a 97% loss is a better run than a 60% one, and the Service Record treats it that way.

Forced guesses and luck

Sometimes Minesweeper stops being a logic puzzle for exactly one tap:

Both 1s touch both hidden tiles: one mine, two identical candidates, and no number anywhere that can ever tell them apart. That’s a forced guess — the board made you gamble, and Donpa tracks it honestly:

• When you survive a forced guess, the game stamps the survival odds your tap had at that moment — 50% above, worse in nastier positions (three tiles hiding two mines is a 1-in-3 pick; tangled endgame pockets can be worse). Survive a bad one and the result panel says so; your Service Record keeps a running luck line per board.
• Dying to a forced guess is fate, not error — the loss panel stamps the odds as consolation.

The fine print, because the numbers are honest: the tracking is exact but conservative. A tap only counts as a forced guess when the game has proved no safe move existed anywhere (or that a sealed pocket could never be resolved by playing on). Positions too tangled to prove stay silent — so every recorded guess carries true odds, and if the game says nothing about a death, a safe move was still on the board somewhere. You just hadn’t found it.

Better than even odds isn’t luck, by the way — surviving an 85% tap is Tuesday. The toasts only celebrate coin flips and worse.

Pace: speed the dice can’t inflate

A lucky board opens in three taps; a cruel one makes you earn every tile. Raw time can’t tell those apart — pace can. Every board has a minimum number of moves a perfect player would need (the classic 3BV measure), and your pace is that minimum divided by your time: required moves per second. A fast time on a trivial board is a normal pace; a decent time on a dense one can be a great pace.

Every win shows its pace on the result panel, and the Service Record keeps a recent pace (a weighted read over your last ten wins on that board — it drifts down with rust and back up with form) and a best pace next to each best time. Recent is the honest “how good am I now”; the scoreboard stays the trophy shelf.

Drills: practice without the dice

The Drills family (leftmost in New game, and where a fresh install starts) generates boards that never force a guess — every board is verified fully solvable by pure deduction before you see it. Fixed 12% mine density, five sizes from XS to XL, with their own best times.

It’s the place to learn the patterns — the 1-2-1, the 1-2-2-1, wall reads — and later, the place to speedrun them, because a no-guess board is a fair stopwatch.

Where to go from there

The board matrix unlocks as you play: bigger sizes, denser ranks, the hexagonal Hive, and Round (wrap-around) edges each open on wins, and locked options always show what opens them. Wins pin Decorations — medals from first blood to genuine feats — in your Service Record (and, strictly opt-in, the app can report them to Game Center). And when you’re ready to compare notes, the Mess hall lets you swap score cards both ways with a player in the same room (Nearby) — no accounts, no servers. Shared cards carry best times and pace, so mixed-skill circles have more to compare than raw stopwatch tables.

Questions the guide doesn’t answer live on the support page, and bugs go to GitHub.