Dragonsweeper — A minesweeper game that requires observation

Since I couldn&#x27;t find a description of the rules anywhere:<p>- Spaces contain monsters of various levels (numbers) and cause your character to lose that amount of HP when clicked. They drop the same amount of gold which you use to level up.<p>- Leveling up fully heals you and you gain 1 max HP<p>- You&#x27;ll need to explore the map beating enough low level monsters to continuously level up while managing your HP. You CAN go to zero HP but not below.<p>- Get to level 15 and defeat the dragon to win the game.

Pretty cool design, I am not sure if some boards are unsolvable or if I suck though. Some hints:<p><pre><code> * It works similar to minesweeper so hints&#x2F;patters for minesweeper also applies. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;minesweeper.online&#x2F;help&#x2F;patterns * Prefer levelling up to heal over the hearts. You can use hearts later for bigger heals * Don&#x27;t level up unless needed to. Try to hit 0 heart before levelling up. * Point is exploring as much as possible * You can use right mouse button to mark cells with numbers or X (for mine). If you figure out a cell don&#x27;t open it unless you want to explore that area. If not just mark them and leave them. Later when you need to heal&#x2F;level up, you can kill those marked cells for extra XP with no cost since the health you have will be wasted anyway. * While picking up hearts again prefer the ones that in areas you want to explore into * To make things easier, at the beginning you can just open random cells that are far away from the orbs. If you die, you won&#x27;t lose much :)</code></pre>

Similar to Mamonosweeper, a 10 year old game from a japanese dev: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hojamaka.com&#x2F;game&#x2F;mamono_sweeper_h2&#x2F;html5&#x2F;en.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hojamaka.com&#x2F;game&#x2F;mamono_sweeper_h2&#x2F;html5&#x2F;en.html</a> (playable in html5 there).<p>This game was released on android at a point (and removed from the store later). It&#x27;s my favorite game ever.<p><pre><code> This is a cross between Minesweeper and an RPG. You gain levels by killing weak monsters and win when you defeat them all. It&#x27;s a bit different than Minesweeper in that the number you reveal when you click on a square is the total of the levels of the monsters in adjacent squares. When you click on a tile with a monster in it, a battle begins. First you attack, and deal damage (equal to your level) to the monster. On the next turn, if the monster is still alive, it attacks you back. Your attacks alternate until one of you dies. You don&#x27;t see this, though -- the battle plays out instantly after you click.</code></pre>

Had a lot of fun with this last week, played 10-20 games. It does reach a point where you can beat every game, I found myself craving an extended version that introduces some new elements.<p>One gripe, the code is incredibly inefficient - my laptop fan was running full speed and battery draining fast, while the game board just sits there with no animations or anything going on. Should be basically using 0% CPU while idle.<p>Anyway really fun concept &amp; execution, and great game design.

If you liked this, there&#x27;s a game on steam: &quot;Desktop dungeons&quot;. It&#x27;s a more refined version and more puzzles, character classes etc <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;226620&#x2F;Desktop_Dungeons&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;226620&#x2F;Desktop_Dungeons&#x2F;</a>

Quite difficult!<p>Form another slightly similar game, they used a trick to avoid stupid errors. When the user clicks on a monster that would kill them, the game ignores the first click. If the moron clicks again, they die. You can implement the same trick to squares marked with a red number too. (And perhaps to upgrade or hearts when you are too healthy.)<p>[spoiler alert]<p>Most of the time you have to buy knowledge in exchange of health.

Fun game! I lost a few points short of killing the dragon as I assumed it would work out that he was definitely killable if you wasted no heals. Turns out that’s false.<p>I can now fully clear the board very quickly. A few insights:<p>Since the lich is always in a corner you can guess where he is by checking just three corners. This also unlocks a free powerful spot on the map. It has strength 11 mind you.<p>You have to get your extra power ups early if you want enough hp to clear the board. This means you have to explore aggressively to find the gnome (10 coins) and the lich (2 coins per mine). It’s not terribly strict but you can’t waste time grinding up levels. You generally just want to explore tiles that you know won’t kill you. Don’t waste time on walls. Those are just buffer spots to help you avoid wasting heat scrolls.<p>The ? Blocks mean there’s a strength 5 beholder guy 2 spaces away. He obscures all tiles within a radius of 2 so it’s pretty easy to guess where he is. He’s a great target to hit because it usually lets you jump forward.<p>The 8 strength slimes cluster together. Might as well just leave that area alone once you find it.<p>Edit: 5:21 for a first attempt at an any% time

I&#x27;ve been playing this game all week.<p>A few essential things you should know: 8&#x27;s are only on the 2 rows&#x2F;columns next to the edge. 11&#x27;s are always in the corner and if you see a &#x27;?&#x27; the purple 5 point monster is 2 blocks away, which direction you&#x27;ll need to figure out!<p>Not essential: Mice look at a specific direction for a reason. You might figure out why later

To anyone else who&#x27;s puzzled by how this could be possible to beat - after fighting an enemy, you need to click the square _again_ to collect the diamonds (&quot;XP&quot;, I guess?) to allow you to level up.

&gt; This game is not designed to run on your device.<p>This would be more actionable if it revealed to me what platform the game <i>is</i> designed for.<p>Out of curiosity I tried running it anyway and it filled the viewport with rapidly flashing colored bars.

Adding some descriptions would definitely make the game easier to start with. For example the game starts with the orbs that can be clicked without danger, this could be shown or described.<p>Also the boxes are not dangerous, and the walls are unknown in strength.<p>It could help to add 0 to non-dangerous items, to make this more aligned to the rest of the numbers, or a ? for the walls.<p>I also struggled to understand that i survive with 0 health.<p>Lastly it doesnt make sense to me why the killed monsters &quot;gold&quot; must be gathered (clicked again). I strongly assumed i cannot have more then the slots filled with gold, only when i had to pick one up i did so and figured out i can have + gold.<p>Apart from the difficult part of understanding how it works, its a very nice game. But you took quite some time off the reviews i have to do for my students game design projects ;-) The ? do appear to gathered in some areas and prevented me from finding the bombs, but i was able to slay the dragon.<p>Also add a mute button...<p>edit: more detailed description

This is a great and well-constructed game but the difficulty scaling is almost comically bad, like, incredibly frustrating. I would recommend adding a tutorial level and some easier difficulty settings. Then the game would at least have the appearance that it is winnable.<p>Edit: Final score 195 in about a thousand tries. It was the catchy soundtrack that kept me going.

I feel like I&#x27;m grokking the rules after a couple of runthroughs and a peek at the help page (the button on the bottom right). I&#x27;m liking the idea of this game but need to make better use of the monster counts that you see in the help page - mostly because a 100+ score will usually mean exactly on 100 level mine, so can be treated as &quot;there is an adjacent mine&quot; rather than &quot;there are 100 points of monsters adjacent.<p>Two things bother me though.<p>The thing that I continue to find most confusing is that sometimes a square has a question mark instead of a number. From looking at boards after I lose there does not appear any pattern to this.<p>The other thing that&#x27;s strange is the &quot;wall&quot; squares -- seems like a wall can take a couple of hits to break, you can&#x27;t die from a wall, and you seem to get damage each time you hit it and an arbitrary amount of gold from breaking it. Does anyone have any better ideas on how these work?

At the end credits it says inspired by <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hojamaka.com&#x2F;games&#x2F;mamono_sweeper" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hojamaka.com&#x2F;games&#x2F;mamono_sweeper</a> which is also a fun game on its own :)

This seems to kind of work on mobile, except the right half of the game board is cut off, making it unfinishable despite playable.<p>Everything else works, but like 3-4 columns of tiles missing on the right and a purple book at the bottom which is visible in the screenshot.<p>So seems like just some fix needed to avoid that cut-off in the right an it should work properly on mobile.<p>I tried both chrome and firefox on android, with and without desktop mode, with and without horizontal orientation. Always exactly same cutoff problem. I have no idea what creates this problem so consistently in 2 different browsers in desktop mode.

This is such a fun game! Once I got used to it, it felt a lot like a very careful dungeon crawl.<p>[Spoiler]<p>Extra experience points go into the next level up, so it is better to empty the hearts before leveling up.

A big improvement would be showing how many box numbers you marked, visible and left in the help screen to help you with your guesses. It only shows how many left

bug report:<p>on the right there are some fields with improbable numers, 116 (first picture) and 200 and 112 (second picture) seem in conflict with other numbers.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;PCHEcI4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;PCHEcI4</a>

I block HTML5 canvas reading in Floorp, which screwed up the book. Normally I can disable it but no dice here.

I had to set the player hp to 1 million so I could just click the dragon and set myself free.

Fun game, would fit well on mobile. The mark mechanic might be the trickiest thing to translate over, maybe tap and hold to bring up a numpad sort of interface? I&#x27;d drop a couple bucks on it.

of course the run where i waste the starting heal spell is the run I win

Very much like Desktop Dungeons, which is high praise in my mind.<p>Excellent work! I think a lot of the feedback here is well intentioned but not from people as used to the turn-based space.<p>Really enjoying this. Thanks

Found that it works on Firefox on mobile, if you request the desktop version and change the zoom to 50% . does anybody have a better option for mobile?

I haven&#x27;t been able to figure out what the ? in squares mean.

What does marking a square with different numbers (or an X) mean?

Runs instantly on my phone but is cropped and unplayable<p>Does not run in edge&#x2F;Firefox&#x2F;chrome on my windows 11 laptop. Just rapidly changing colored bars forever.

I have gotten good enough to solve the map every time, but still can&#x27;t seem to get enough XP to reach level 15...

There is a comment in the help book about observing patterns at the death screen. Has anyone figured out what that means?

Huh, I thought I played perfectly, but when I cleared the board (aside from the dragon), I had only 14 hearts left.

This is a lovely little game, nice work.

Is there a way to download it? It would be nice to decide to play even while offline.

This is really fun.

AAA indie game :)