It seems like every game is getting a Roguelike reimagining nowadays, and I’m all for it. Not even the old Windows classics are exempt from this trend, and Minesweeper lends itself super well to the formula.
That said, there’s one particular take on the ol’ sweeping of mines that has consumed my free time to levels I’m embarrassed to admit: Tacticsweeper by Moocowsgomoo, a free game that introduces turrets, cryomines, scanners, and a wide array of other tools and threats to spice up the classic formula in an intoxicating way.
Feeling like Bill Gates (because I’m addicted to Minesweeper)
Minesweeper is a glorious little game, the crown jewel of the original Windows Entertainment Pack (think FreeCell and its ilk as companions), one of the few old-school time sinks that survived all the way to the present day.
It was such an ingenious little product that even Microsoft founder Bill Gates got hopelessly addicted to it in the early nineties, battling with his engineers to break their records and going so far that he deleted the game from his own PC to reclaim some long-lost productivity. Little good that did, though, as he ended up sneaking into then-Microsoft president Michael Hallman’s office instead to play some more after work hours.
Thankfully, I can’t tell how much time I’ve clocked in with Tacticsweeper so far because I might end up having to nuke my PC entirely to keep myself from playing it some more.
Probes and turrets and traps, oh my
So, how do you turn the Minesweeper experience into a Roguelike? There have been many such takes on the formula from Let’s! Revolution! to DemonCrawl and Skull Sweeper and beyond, but for my money, Tacticsweeper is the game that best combines the original gameplay experience with a Tactical Breach Wizards-style interlocking logic puzzle and an escalating level of threat.
This little gem turns the minesweeping experience into firing a series of probes onto a battlefield, where turrets, traps, and special mines keep interfering with your regular number-crunching action—something you can thankfully counteract with a series of nifty upgrades you unlock along the way.
This means the threat levels remain high with every click, even if you know that a cell has no mine under its surface, as a short-range AA gun or a long-range laser turret can take out your probe along the way—and that is before even more challenging foes and the number-fudging special mines come into the picture. EMP mines replace the numbers with question marks, trap mines pretend to be turrets, or other structures, dual mines and mirror mines mess around with the math in their own different ways, and that’s before you run into the “final boss,” the Ultimine, whose horrifying abilities I will not reveal now so as to save you all from a heart attack.
To counter these dastardly threats, you can unlock various upgrades over time, which range from area scanners to outright revealing mines, shielding your probes or salvaging them after making a mistake. Even with the full kit unlocked late into the game, the challenges remain far from trivial.
For a short and experimental little game, Tacticsweeper offers great replayability, too, with its endless mode. A handful of levels with a regular progression introduces most of the possible threats and lets you unlock most of the available upgrades in the game, but should you survive the Ultimine challenge, an endless mode awaits you, with some disgusting new enemies and the last handful of perks you haven’t yet claimed. There are more than enough threat options for the game to mix and match boards level after level, and their interactions create some genuinely great brain teasers to pick apart… over and over and over again.
Now, if you excuse me, I think I will need to sneak into a colleague’s office to fire up this baby once more. If you are also looking to replicate the Bill Gates experience, you can try Tacticsweeper on Moocowsgomoo’s itch.io site.
