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

There is also Yusuke Endoh's version, where the only thing you do is guess. Computer will automatically mark all the spots where it has enough information to make an inference.

https://mame.github.io/minesweeper-spoiled-by-ai/

This reminds me of absurdle:

https://qntm.org/files/absurdle/absurdle.html

Or the more evil version: https://dontwordle.com/

I also like Mosaic, a variant of Minesweeper: https://www.puzzle-minesweeper.com/mosaic-5x5-easy/

As described, that would lead to a 100% loss rate.

Even if you're allowed to make a guess on an empty board (classic Minesweeper will wait to generate the board until you do, so that your first guess is never a mine), most games end in a 50/50 chance.

You can also swap primary and secondary clicks (at least in the Android version), which makes it the fastest on touchscreens as well.

Even better, the latest release from a few weeks ago lets you manually set the delay for long press. I've set it for 100ms and can now blaze through mines even faster. But that guaranteed solvable makes it so much better than nondeterministic minesweeper as well.

I just never flag the mines.

It also has a glaring wart in its API because of Minesweeper needing to allow the first click before deciding the layout of the puzzle.

I've sometimes thought of adding a puzzle to this collection but I would actually rather refactor everything to remove that wart. It would involve turning Minesweeper into a game with a foyer, but probably worth doing?

Also, I thought the modern Windows version of minesweeper did the same first-click-is-free logic?