Paweł Marczewski writes about his small game projects, including Kaboom, an adversarial Minesweeper, and a Rust rewrite of Minefield Mahjong.
HN commenters like Kaboom as practice for avoiding guesses in Minesweeper, and link his post on how it works alongside SAT-solver comparisons.
There was a Minesweeper on here that used a SAT solver, but I cannot find it at the moment. As I recall, it never had any issue with resolving the board quickly. I think it dynamically resolved where the mines would be as you played the game, and if you clicked a square that could be a mine, it would be a mine, except, I believe, when there were no open squares that were safe.
(Edit: Here it is! https://pwmarcz.pl/kaboom/ And the write-up: https://pwmarcz.pl/blog/kaboom/ )
This is similar in spirit to my take on the game: https://magnushoff.com/articles/minesweeper/
Unfortunately, not being familiar with SAT solvers, my implementation can grind to a halt in some configurations :)
It's amazing how good this is for training!
Apparently I am not that great at minesweeper and guess way too often when it's not necessary. This variation kills those bad habits pretty quickly by punishing you 100% of the time for guessing. Along with undo and double checking with the debugger, I've picked up way more patterns/heuristics than in my years of playing.
Coolest thing is that if you're a perfect logician you can always win!
Link to actual game since it's not prominent in article: https://pwmarcz.pl/kaboom/
There was a Minesweeper variant called Kaboom, where you're playing against a computer that's trying to make you lose. The computer has to comply with all revealed information, but if you ever make a guess, no matter how improbable, it's have over.
https://pwmarcz.pl/blog/kaboom/
Previous discussion on HackerNews:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21883875
I made Autotable, a tabletop simulator for Riichi Mahjong: https://pwmarcz.pl/autotable/about.html
I wanted to play with my friends the way we used to in real life. It ended up being a very interesting and rewarding project.
Here is a blog post about developing the game: https://pwmarcz.pl/blog/autotable/
See also:
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/mines.html - no guessing ever required
https://pwmarcz.pl/kaboom/ - if you guess and you could have deduced, you always die; if you can't deduce, you're always safe.
I'd like to have the option to show "remaining" mines. I've played https://pwmarcz.pl/kaboom/ enough in "countdown mode" (i.e. where the numbers are the number of hidden mines) that I can't adjust to this....