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How to Get Minesweeper on Your Mac


If you’ve been a die-hard Apple fan since you first put your fingers to a keyboard, there’s a chance you’ve never experienced the thrill of Minesweeper—one of the two classic games that used to be found on Microsoft’s Windows operating system. If that’s true, or if you just miss the thrill of losing game, after game, after game of Minesweeper, worry not: It’s time to Macsweep.

Playing minesweeper on your Mac

There are lots of different ways to play Minesweeper on your Mac—and plenty that don’t even depend on your platform loyalty. For a solid, enhanced Minesweeper experience that doesn’t look like someone coded it in a day, I recommend checking out ProximityMines.

Though the full version of the game costs you $4, that’s generally what you’ll pay for a decent version of Minesweeper from the Mac App Store. You can find cheaper versions of the game, but they look like a carbon-copy of the Windows title—or worse.

With ProximityMines, you get a game that doesn’t pop up a 32-bit warning when you go to load it on High Sierra (unlike some other Minesweeper variants you can find on the web). It also has a slightly more modern interface than the classic Minesweeper look, a loud “click” noise whenever you click on an unknown tile, and an unhappy “boom” whenever you choose poorly.

Best of all, you can play the basic version of ProximityMines as long as you want without paying a penny. If you tire of the challenge and demand more, you have to pay for the full version of the game to clean mines from bigger levels. And if you find that 30 minutes on the basic level is all you need to satisfy your nostalgia craving, there you go—the cost of a burrito, saved.

How about a Minesweeper MMO?

I’d be a bad Minesweeper fan if I also didn’t give a friendly callout to A Few Billion Square Tiles, a massively multiplayer version of Minesweeper that challenges you to unclear more of a giant, randomized, infinite board than everyone else playing. If you’re interested in putting your mine-clearing skills to a challenge, give the free demo a whirl—or pony up $3 to buy it off the Mac App Store.


Do you have a Mac app (paid or free) that you absolutely love? Tell us about it: [email protected].