Polemarch123

Game design suggestions for preserving the Minesweeper flavour (e.g. tension to not explode!) and to discourage random guessing: - Every time you explode a mine, you can't perform any actions for the next 5 seconds in addition to losing a few points. - Exception: for the first little bit (say 5-10 seconds, or until a certain percentage of the board is opened) no punishments for incorrect actions (maybe just scores, but don't allow scores to go negative). - Modify flagging to be private per-user information (don't provide any points for it) and allow undoing flags. As someone else mentioned, this keeps with the flavour of the original minesweeper where the goal is clearing; mines are automatically flagged at the end.

I agree with this, for good Minesweeper players (my record on expert is around 55 seconds) a rate limit of 3 per second is low enough that it feels frustrating and glitchy. I think I averaged approximately 5 clicks/second on vanilla Minesweeper, but presumably with higher peaks. I imagine at launch you're getting more curious first-time players, but your community would likely gravitate towards more experienced players over time.

A simple suggestion to encourage more fair matchmaking without building a big system for it is to have separate Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced boards, and let players self-select.