If you thought that Minesweeper was too easy, or that guessing in Minesweeper is a sin that should be avoided at all costs, then this is the game for you. 14 Variants is a brutally hard game that expects you to follow a bunch of potentially obscure logical trails to deduce every square and can even punish you if your logic isn’t sound.
That sounds kinda strict, doesn’t it? Thats the point. The game is designed so that every single board can be resolved to a single step without needing to make any guesses that aren’t logically sound. The game includes an Expert Mode, which I do personally recommend, where if you make a guess that could be wrong, the game will automatically recreate the board in a configuration that is wrong. That means the only way to progress is to only mark or clear squares that cannot possibly be construed to be wrong.
And I’ve said all this without actually talking about the game’s main gimmick: the variants. The game includes a lot of variants, 14 of them depending on how you count (if you count vanilla, that makes 15, if you count combination, 16, 17, etc, lets say 14 for now.)
Some of these varients are very simple to work with. [W] Wall for instance replaces each clue with a Picross clue, saying how long each string of mines surrounding the number is, so instead of seeing a 5, you might get a 1,2,2, which would indicate that instead of 5 mines in a row, there are 2 sets of 2 in a row, and a single mine. There are also variants that affect the board rather than the clues, such as [T] Triple, which states that you cannot have 3 mines in a row orthogonally or diagonally, which you can use to eliminate tiles when used in conjunction with the clues.
The game has a hint system. Use it. You may not get a perfect star when using the hint system, but a mistake also invalidates a perfect clear too, so if you’re stuck, use the hint system. It’ll tell you what tile(s) you can fill in, and what clues and rules you need to use in order to prove it. This is an invaluable tool for learning the kind of logical deduction that the game requires you to know, and can be so important in the harder variants such as [E] Eyesight and [O] Outside.
This game has a lot of content. Once you clear 5 levels of [V] Vanilla, you unlock your first board and clue variants, and clearing 5 of a variant unlocks the next one in the line. Once you clear 5 levels of each of the 7 clue and 7 board variants, you’ll unlock [+] and [#]. [+] gives you levels that combine a random board and clue variant. [#] gives you levels where each individual clue states what kind of clue it is, essentially combining all 7 (+Vanilla) clue variants.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1865060 £5.89 (Demo available)
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