# The &kmines; Handbook

Nicolas Hadacek

    hadacek@kde.org

Michael McBride

    mmcbride@ematic.org

Nicolas Hadacek

    hadacek@kde.org

Developer
Lauri Watts

    lauri@kde.org

Reviewer
2000 Nicolas Hadacek, Michael McBride
&FDLNotice;
2004-01-12
2.1.8

&kmines; is the &kde; version of the classic minesweeper game.

KDE game minesweeper

## Introduction

&kmines; is the classic Minesweeper game. You must uncover all the empty squares without blowing up a mine.

When you uncover a square, a number appears: it indicates how many mines surround this square. If there is no number the neighboring squares are automatically uncovered. When you find a square that you are sure contains a mine, it is very useful to put a flag on it (by right-clicking).

## How to play

You have to use the mouse and its three buttons to uncover or to flag the squares (with two-buttoned mice, clicking the middle button is generally achieved by simultaneously pressing the left and the right buttons). Here are the details:

- The left button will uncover a square. If there is a bomb below that square, the bomb will explode, and the game will be over.

  If there is not a bomb under the square, a number will appear. That is the number of neighboring squares that contain bombs. Which ones? you ask: That's the point of the game.

  For each square (excluding edge and corner squares), there are 8 neighboring squares.

  If none of the neighboring squares has a bomb, then a blank will be shown under the square, and all neighboring squares will be automatically uncovered.

  Left clicking a flagged square is safe and does nothing.

- The right button will mark a square as containing a mine (by drawing a red flag on it) or, if the option is set, as being uncertain (by drawing a question mark on it). The uncertain tag can be useful when you are puzzled about the positions of mines.

- The middle button will clear the surrounding squares if the right number of squares is already flagged. It is very useful since it is much quicker than uncovering all individual squares.

  If your flags are not properly positioned, you will explode a bomb.

- Pressing the yellow smiley will start a new game.

These are the default settings. The mouse buttons can be reprogrammed. For more information, see the section entitled Game Options.

### The &kmines; Screen

The &kmines; Screen
The &kmines; Screen

The &kmines; screen consists of:

- A Box showing you the number of mines still left to be marked. Every time you flag a bomb site, this number will decrease by one.

  This box does not determine if you are right or wrong, but only how many mines you need to theoretically mark before you are done with this game.

  In this example, there are 10 mines to be marked.

- A Yellow Smiley Face. Clicking this will start a new game. If you lose the game, it will become a frown.

- The box on the right shows how much time this round has taken. The shortest time for each level is listed as the high score.

- The playing area. This will vary in size depending on the difficulty level of the game. In this example, it consists of 64 squares. This is where you play the game.

## Game options

The options to &kmines; are set by selecting Settings Configure &kmines; from the menu-bar. This will bring up a dialog box.

&kmines; Preferences
&kmines; Preferences

This dialog box is divided into three sections.

Game

  The first option, labeled Enable ? Mark, determines whether you can mark squares as questionable. If this option is checked, then right clicking the mouse will first cause a square to be flagged. If you right click again on the same square, the flag will change to a ?, to indicate you don't know if there is a bomb there or not. If you click again, the square will change back to blank.

  If there is not a mark in front of this option, the first right mouse click will change the square to a red flag. The second will make it blank again, thus skipping the ? symbol.

  The next option down, labeled Enable keyboard, determines if the keyboard shortcuts will work while playing the game. The default keyboard shortcuts are given in , and can be changed by selecting Settings Configure Shortcuts....

  The only keyboard shortcuts affected are those responsible for playing the game. Keyboard commands such as New Game and Quit, still work, regardless of this option.

  The Pause if windows lose focus option will automatically pause the game if the &kmines; window loses focus. When the game is paused, the gameboard disappears, so you can't use pausing the game as a way to cheat!

  The "Magic" reveal option switches on Magic reveal mode. In this mode, &kmines; does most of the gameplay for you: If you have uncovered enough squares to be able to tell with certainty that a square contains a mine, &kmines; will automatically mark it as a mine, and perform an autoreveal on squares for which it has marked the correct number of mines. Note that when you have this mode switched on, your scores do not count as highscores.

  The last section of this tab allows you to change the action of each of the three mouse buttons. Your options are:

  Reveal

    This will reveal the contents of the square. If there is no bomb, then a number will appear. If there is a bomb under that square, then the bomb will explode, and the game will be over.

  Toggle Mark

    Clicking with this button on a square will mark/unmark with a red flag.

  Autoreveal

    Clicking on a square with this button will automatically reveal all neighboring squares that are not marked with red flags. If one of those neighboring squares has a bomb under it, the bomb will explode, and the game will be over.

  Toggle flag

    Clicking with this button on a square will cycle through blank, red flag, and question mark.

  Toggle ? mark

    Clicking with this button on a square will mark/unmark with a question mark.

Appearance

  The top option, entitled case size, determines the size of each of the squares in the playing area. By default, they are set small. You may want to increase the size if you are working on a very high resolution monitor.

  The rest of this page is concerned with colors. To adjust, simply click the color button beside each description, and select the new color.

Custom Game

  Finally, if you are not finding the existing configurations challenging enough, you can set up a custom game here. Use the sliders to change the Width, Height, and the percentage of the board covered with Mines. The default game has 20 percent of the board covered, so there is plenty of room to make the game harder.

Saving your changes

  Once your changes are complete, click OK to make them permanent.

  If you want to abandon your changes, click Cancel to abort the changes.

  If you click on Default, the default settings will be restored. Click OK to make these default changes permanent, or edit the settings some more.

## Commands/Keyboard Shortcuts

The following sections briefly describe each menu-bar option.

### Game Menu

The Game menu consists of 5 options.

&Ctrl;N Game New

  Starts a new game.

P Game Pause

  Pauses the game. This will hide the board (no cheating), and give you a button to press when you want to continue this game.

&Ctrl;H Game Show Highscores

  This shows you the high score (the shortest time) for each difficulty level.

&Ctrl;Q Game Quit

  Quits &kmines;

### Move Menu

H Move Hint

  If you use this item, you will get a hint about where you should click next. If you do that your score will not be added to the high-scores.

Move Solve

  This item tries to solve the current game.

Move Solving Rate...

  This item shows a dialog that calculates the solving rate for the current game type.

Move View Log

  This item shows a dialog with the log of the last game.

Move Replay Log

  This item replays the current log.

Move Save Log...

  This item shows a dialog to save the current log.

Move Load Log...

  This item shows a dialog to load a log.

### Settings Menu

Settings Show Menubar

  If there is a check in front of this option, then the menu-bar will be visible. Selecting this option, hides the menu-bar.

  To restore a hidden menu-bar, click outside the game play area, with the right mouse button. This will bring up a small sub-menu. Simply select Show Menubar from this sub-menu, and the menu-bar will be visible again.

Settings Choose Game Type

  Lets you set the difficulty level from a sub-menu.

  There are three default levels of difficulty: Easy (64 squares, 10 mines), Normal (256 squares, 40 mines), and Expert (480 squares, 99 mines). There is also a Custom... level settings.

  If you select Custom..., then the settings you have configured in the Configure &kmines; dialog will be used.

Settings Configure Shortcuts...

  This item lets you change the keyboard shortcuts used by &kmines;.

Settings Configure Notifications...

  This item displays a standard &kde; notifications configuration dialog, where you can change the notifications (sounds, visible messages, &etc;) used by &kmines;.

Settings Configure Highscores...

  Here you can change your Nickname and add a cute Comment about yourself, to show in the high score table. You can also enable the World-wide highscores enabled checkbox, and share your skill at &kmines; across the world with an online high score server.

Settings Configure &kmines;

  Allows you to adjust game options. For more detailed information, see the section entitled Game Options.

### Help Menu

&help.menu.documentation;

### Default Keyboard Shortcuts

The following table shows you the default keyboard shortcuts.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Key Combo | Action
--- | ---
Arrows | Move cursor in playing area.
PageDown | Move to bottom edge
PageUp | Move to top edge
Home | Move to left edge
End | Move to right edge
Space | Reveal square.
W | Mark square as mine
Return | Automatically reveal all surrounding squares not marked by a flag.
&Ctrl;N | New Game
P | Pause Game
&Ctrl;Q | Quit &kmines;
&Shift;F1 | What's This Help

These key bindings can be changed by selecting Settings Configure Key Bindings from the menu-bar.

## Credits and License

&kmines;

Program copyright 1996-2000 &Nicolas.Hadacek; &Nicolas.Hadacek.mail;

Documentation copyright 2000 &Nicolas.Hadacek; &Nicolas.Hadacek.mail;

Documentation updated for &kde; 2.0 by &Mike.McBride; &Mike.McBride.mail;

Some changes for &kde; 3.2 by &Philip.Rodrigues; &Philip.Rodrigues.mail;

&underFDL; &underGPL;

## Installation

### How to obtain &kmines;

&install.intro.documentation;

### Compilation and Installation

&install.compile.documentation;