Join the Minesweeper Ranking

1. Register. (An email will be sent with a link to activate your account.)
	Register!	Name, Nickname, Country, Email
2. Play an official version of Minesweeper that saves game videos:
	Arbiter 0.52.3	Most advanced. Statistics, hundreds of options, graphs and video features. *.AVF*
	Minesweeper X	Download and play. No install so you can play at work. *.MVR*
	Viennasweeper 3.0	Fast clone with special tournament features. *.RMV*
3. Your best games will automatically save as videos. Please log-in and upload your videos. It will take a few days for the Admin to watch your video and add it to the ranking.
	Country Ranks: World Ranking:	A video for each level (8x8, 16x16, 16x30). Your 3 best videos < 100s (Example: 5 - 20 - 74 = 99 seconds)
Or, you can email Damien with your videos and information:
	Name Username Country Score dates	Your name Your online name, nick or pseudo. Country of citizenship The date for each record
4. You will receive an email telling you about the next update. If you ask, you will also receive a password to upload videos, compete in the Active Ranking, and edit your Profile.

Ranking FAQS

Microsoft Minesweeper

Microsoft minesweeper is no longer allowed on the rankings except in special cases. There are many reasons. First, it uses a small number of boards that repeat. Players began using board cycles to play the same board multiple times. This is an example of Unfair Prior Knowledge. UPK is also a problem of Vista minesweeper, because you are allowed to play a game many times until you win. Another problem is that the original game uses an 8x8 Beginner grid with 10 mines, but starting with ME and XP, Microsoft changed it to a 9x9 grid with 10 mines. This makes Beginner much easier. All official versions use the original grid size. Finally, there are many cheats and solvers available, making it impossible to prove that your scores are real. The clock on Windows is unreliable and suffers from Timer Jump and Timer Lag. Official minesweeper clones have security features to prevent cheating and make encrypted videos with decimal time.

3BV

3BV is the number of left clicks needed to win a game. It is a measure of board difficulty. Limits of 2-30-99 are used to stop very lucky games from joining the ranking. They still count as personal records, but the ranking attempts to rank skill, not luck. For example, many people have won Beginner games in 1 lucky click but this involves no skill.

Lucky Games

Beginner games are sometimes won with random clicks - the player is 'Lucky'. Since 2011-04-06 a Beginner game must have 1 or more clicks made on purpose because of a reaction to game information (numbers). You can still get an easy game, but you must solve it (not accidentally win by clicking).

UPK

Unfair Prior Knowledge is banned from the rankings. This includes practicing a board, manipulating board cycles or using memory exploits to read game information in advance. The player must only use information revealed by his clicks while the timer is running on a first attempt to solve the game.

Videos

All official versions of minesweeper save videos of your records automatically. They can be found in the folder you installed the game.

Clone and Arbiter automatically save many types of record, such as time, 3BV/s, IOE, RQP, IOS and NF versions of these stats. You can invent saving rules and choose folders and filenames for each rule. MSX saves time records on video but gives you the option to save all games or just games under a certain time limit for each level. Viennasweeper saves every game.

Decimal Time

The world ranking uses Real Time starting at 0.00. Most official versions of minesweeper start at 0.00 but Clone starts at 1.00. So Clone scores get 1 second subtracted before being added to the ranking. This is a result of Microsoft starting the minesweeper clock at 1 on the first click, so programmers disagreed about how to start the decimal clock. The world ranking leaves Microsoft scores as integers. For example, a 5 on Beginner is actually between 4.00 and 4.99 but there is no way to tell so it is left as a 5.

Clone Videos from China

Clone videos made in many Asian countries (China, Japan, Korea) do not work on Western computers. The opposite is also true. To watch these videos you need to change the language on your computer. For example, in Windows Vista go to the Control Panel, select 'Clock, Language & Region', select 'Change the date, time, number format' and choose a format like 'Chinese (Hong Kong S.A.R)'. Then you can open Clone and watch the games. You can find instructions at this website. Microsoft does not allow you to download language packs - you need to have it already installed on your computer (like Vista), to install it from the Windows CD (like XP), or search online for a torrent ("East Asian Language").