Dragonsweeper
A minesweeper game that requires observation.
Make sure to read the monsternomicon.
Download
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Development log
- New Dragonsweeper Version!Feb 06, 2025
A minesweeper game that requires observation.
Make sure to read the monsternomicon.
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
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This is like if one of those bait and switch mobile games were serious.
hi
how are you?
I keep finding outdated, incomplete or plain incorrect information, so one more compilation of all the gameplay tricks as of v1.1.18:
SPOILERS
P1- Rats are looking in the horizontal direction of the Rat King. If they are in the same vertical column, they are standing up instead.
P3- Skeletons - nothing to note (unlike previous versions of the game)
P4- Gargoyles always come in pairs (vertical or horizontal) which are looking at each other (look at their tiny red eyes). There are 4 pairs.
This means if you've got two adjacent boxes totalling 8, high chance of Gargoyle pair.
Pairs of Gargoyles CAN touch each other, so Gargoyles can be adjacent and not looking at each other (there's just 2 more of them in the area).
P5- Green Slimes are revealed by the Slime Witch's dropped scroll.
P6- Minotaurs are guarding chests: every Minotaur has a chest in one of the 3 boxes diagonally or horizontally behind it. Before its chest has been found and opened, the Minotaur is looking AWAY from it; afterwards, it turns around and gets a little annoyed reaction.
This means every chest has a Minotaur in one of the six adjacent diagonal or horizontal boxes (never vertical).
P7- Guardians: there are 4, one in each quadrant of the field (fun fact, their shields are a hint!). Thus they are never in the lines and columns of the dragon.
P8- The five purple Slimes are only ever in a C-formation barrier surrounding the Slime Witch, against an edge of the board. This formation CAN be in a corner.
Thus there is never an 8 value anywhere in the middle of the board.
They're easy to spot as adjacent boxes suddenly climb to numbers around 16, 24 and 32. Go ahead and snipe the Witch in the middle!
P9- The Lovers drop 9 gold AND a healing scroll. Using the Dragon's column as a central axis, they are in the same box in the same row -- once you've found one, you know where the other is.
P10- The Mine King is always in one of the 4 corners of the board (there is often a bomb or mimic in the others). It drops 10 gold and a scroll that deactivates all mines (WITHOUT revealing them).
P5- The Rat King drops a scroll that reveals the location of all Rats.
Any 5 that is not revealed by the Slime Wizard or surrounded with ? boxes is the Rat King.
It CAN be killed for Rat Pacifist stamp.
P5- The Beholders hide all nearby boxes in a diamond (2 in all cardinal directions, 1 diagonally) with a ? until they are defeated. There's only 2 of them.
You can often deduce their position from just one or two revealed ? boxes.
P1- The Slime Witch is always against a board edge and surrounded with P8 purple Slimes, and drops a scroll that reveals all remaining green and purple Slimes. She's only 1 hit, go ahead and snipe her as soon as you find her entourage!
P11- The Mimic's threat value IS counted by surrounding tiles, and there is only one -- once you know where the P11 is, all chests are safe.
It looks and behaves like a regular treasure chest, only triggering when you click it a second time after first revealing it.
P100- The Mines can be disarmed by clicking the Mine King's scroll. They then drop to a value of 0 and give 3 gold (for a total of 27 gold).
This means it's a good idea to aim for the corners so you can figure out where the Mine King is and snipe him the second you have 10 hearts, then collect the Mines gold and level up.
P0- The Chests (but not the Mimic) are guarded by a P6 Minotaur in one of the six adjacent diagonal or horizontal boxes (never vertical).
3 of them drop 5 gold, 2 drop additional healing scrolls.
P0- The Gnome teleports to an empty box when clicked, until there's none left, at which point he drops 9 gold.
You can't literally "corner" him, as even when backed into a corner, he will teleport away if there's any remaining empty box on the board. He does NOT steal/open chests.
Extras (again, as of v.1.1.18):
-The dragon's egg is in one of the 8 surrounding tiles. It costs 0 hearts and drops 3 gold.
- Walls come in pairs (vertical or horizontal), 3 times. They all take 3 hits and give 1 gold.
You can get the Clear Board stamp with walls remaining and less than the maximum score possible. Maximum score (365) does require smashing all walls which makes it notably harder.
- The Dragon has a threat value of 13. You CAN kill it and collect the 13 gold before the end of the game (it only triggers when you claim).
Stamps:
- Lovers Survive: Claim the crown without killing Romeo or Juliet.
- Clear Board: Claim the crown after killing all enemies, including the Lovers and Mines (you CAN have walls remaining; not sure about chests).
- Future Generation: Claim the crown without destroying the dragon's egg.
- Rat Pacifist: Claim the crown without killing any rat (you CAN kill the Rat King).
Multiple stamps can be earned in one game, but not all 4 of them (as Clear Board is incompatible with the others). As of v.1.1.8 it IS possible to get the 3 others in one game ("Full Pacifist Run", lmao), but highly reliant on luck and finding the Rat King really quickly.
Phew! I think I got everything this time. Thanks everyone in this game's community for pointing out all these details over the years.
If there's even more fun facts I missed, feel free to add!
You didn't mention the cheat code
THE WHAT
Google it, very easy to find. TECHNICALY it's debug mode, but same thing
Also, it's not mathematically possible to clear the board without getting atleast 2 of the chests, you need the 2 hearts. HOWEVER if you do leave any or all of the chests but kill everything else than it DOES NOT COUNT as clear board. There is a cheat code, so you can test out theories and experiment, I wont share it here but if you google it it's super easy to find
This is very addictive! Well done!
I finallly did it, gg! It took me around 3-4 hours in total and i've been on for about 40 minutes straight rn, genuinely used all of my brain to beat this, I did have to guess once and that was really scary but I did it and that's what matters, its really fun and definitely gets you thinking (I was stuck at 0hp at one point for about 2-3 minutes but I managed to figure out a way). Would reccomend, but its very addicting. At least for other people that was hell and i'm never doing it again lol.
welcome to the family. This is my go to time waster since it dropped. Time to get the badges, then the total kill, then just keep playing until you die or the site does.
It's possible to get all peaceful badges at once.
But you need a LOT of luck and restarting the game hoping for the right kinds of drops. (As you need to find the genuine treasure chests before the lilliputian steals them all. So... a spawn where the first scrying ball is right near the dragon with the egg and lilliputian squares revealed. AND your initial click elsewhere being a green slime or something else you can recover from. No click wasted.)
Nothing ever steals treasure chests in this game.
oh? Really? Because I was certain I've chased him around the board and never found any treasure elsewhere.
There are always 5 treasure chests, and the gnome only moves between squares that have been empty all along.
After trying and failing for like 3 hours straight, I went to the comments to see if anyone actually managed to beat this game to make myself feel better, because of course, I was expecting more people to also be having a hard time like I was/am.
So you can imagine my JOY upon finding out that literally everyone BUT me managed to beat this, which leaves me only one choice: play for even MORE hours on end until I DO end up beating it. Thanks. Thanks guys.
Lol, it took me a good few tries to start winning too, and even then, I end up in unwinnable scenarios still. That said, if you haven't been doing this already, avoid walls and try to kill things until you have zero hearts before healing via level up or healing scroll.
LOL I actually figured out that strat really early but I think the issue was that I was too impatient and just wanted to keep going and win rather than sit there and do the math. Slow and steady wins the race, I guess!
But... my ending looks different from all the others in this comment section... which means I have to play even MORE until I ALSO get that ending dammit!!! (Yay!)
Congrats!
It looks like this no longer works in Safari or any browser on iOS. It hangs on load because the files `laugh.wav`, `dragon_death.wav`, and `jorge.wav` are sent with no `Content-Length` header. For some reason, Webkit (iOS and Safari's web engine) does not like this for sound files. These files never load, and `pendingStuffToLoad` in the `loadSound(path)` function in `gamelib.js` never reaches 0. For audio files, Safari seems to send a request with a `Range: bytes=0-1` header, and then sends it again with a`Range: bytes=0-whatever-content-length-was-from-previous-request`. But when a file is gzip compressed, the `Content-Length` isn't given when the `Range` header is present in the request (at least, not for itch's Cloudflare R2 bucket).
I'm not sure what the best fix would be here. Maybe make all the sound effects MP3 or OGG files? Those formats are already compressed, so `Content-Length` would always be available to Safari. Those 3 wav files above happen to be the three biggest wav files that try to load. The cut off seems to be 50 KB since win.wav (46 KB) loads, but jorge.wav (62 KB), doesn't. I observed that Cloudflare Pages does not have this problem (I rehosted it for my own private use). Perhaps itch needs to re-examine their R2 bucket upload settings? Maybe they can ensure that WAV files never get gzipped.
I notice also that for MP3 files, if a server doesn't provide a `Content-Length` header, Safari just plays it anyway. For instance, if an MP3 in Safari is sent with `Transfer-Encoding: chunked` (notice I didn't say `Content-Encoding`), instead of showing you a little playback bar where you can jump back and forth in the playback, it shows a "Live Broadcast" bar and only the pause button is available.
What a whacky browser. You can't escape it on iOS either. Chrome and Firefox on iOS are both forced to use Webkit under the hood, so you literally cannot play it on any iOS device anymore which is very sad.
Fun game, but how the hell do you restart after finishing a run???
I think you should be able to press "R" on your keyboard
edit yeah nvm it doesnt work at the end screen 🥀🥀🥀
You just need to reload. Progress still saves though, so don't worry
This game is like alchemy for time. It turns "I'll just play one game" into "Oh my god I should have gone to bed 3 hours ago". 8 out of 5 stars.
this game is so amazing. VERY satisfying to finally win!!! good job dev :)
Awesome game
THERE ARE STAMPS ⁉⁉⁉⁉ thanks lol now i'll have to spend another hour
A matter of skill, but also luck.
Took me ages to get rat pacifist without savescumming for the rat king at the start
Great game!
Finally beat 5min. 4:30 is the next goal.
this is surprisingly addicting! i might be silly but a number for the xp and hp would be nice rather alongside the hearts and squares so you can know how much you have at a glance (since the numbers on the board are also numbers)
Got all the stamps, did an ultimate pacifist run. Officially 100 percented. Easily the best $5 I've ever spent on any game.
genuinely the most fun I've had playing any puzzle. the experience of studying each monsters patterns made winning feel more rewarding than anything else I've played. Its hard enough to get invested in, but achievable enough to not lose hope. 100/10, a million times over.
10/10!!!!
Pretty hard but fun and I can play this with my tobii dynavox. No happy ending yet.
I don't think beating a video game has ever made me feel so accomplished
This was incredible!!
Hello everyone,
I forgot to indicate that MHAS Dungeon Sweeper was released mid-August ^_^
It was inspired by Dragonsweeper, but with dungeon items and few game modes.
If you're looking for a new challenge, take a look (demo on Itch and Steam):
https://tchevin.itch.io/mhas-dungeon-sweeper
Omg! this is incredible!!
Sooo challenging but really fun [I am yet to beat it but I shan't Give Up!]
THIS SHOULD BE A FULL LENGTH GAME, WITH LEVELS, DIFFERENT BOSSES, PERMANENT UPGRADES AND SO ON. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, I WILL BUY IT
fun, but theres WAYYYYY too many positions where you're basically forced to play a slot machine for if you're gonna survive or not
If you feel that way, you may not have figured out all the secret patterns and ways of using logic to deduce monster locations. It's almost always possible to beat the dragon (but not necessarily to get the achievements) with no unsafe guessing (i.e. no guessing where you might die based on the result).
There are patterns that predict the locations of:
Gargoyles
Egg
Walls
8-slime and slime sorcerer
Necromancer
{6-monster}
Rat King
Combine them and you can slowly chip away at the dungeon without risking a loss.
It's especially useful to understand that the 8s have specific placement rules, and there are only two 9s and one 11. That means you can pretty quickly reach a point where you can say "These three tiles have 15, but none of them can be bigger than 7, so I can safely make this the first click of my 7-health turn."
Those are very good tips; however if you're going for egg-keeper + lovers + rat-friend, it's hard to argue it's not slot-machine based owing to the need to clear rat king and find those treasure chests before the gnome gets them.
(I say this with much love for this game.)
I can't tell you how many times I played this game to get an ending screen. I saw everyone was posting theirs so I was like... I know it can happen! haha, dont know if this is a good score or not but ~200 tries later I finally beat the dragon. Thank you for the game! Absolutely love it even though I am terrible at it!
very enjoyable!!
is the game broken , why i cant run it
I really miss this game, and used to kill so much time with it. But it no longer works on iOS.
I play this game way too much, it's my go to boredom buster
Loved this so much that I spent quite a lot of time making my own kingdom-based version. Thank you for the many hours of fun!
It's very well made but sometimes I feel like the game demands you take a risk when more often then not it leaves you with no other choice. Could be a skill issue but I still love the game
Agreed entirely. I think it's a great mix of certainty (like knowing you only have 1 mimic), educated guess and, on rarer occasions, straight out guess. But I'm fairly sure I still have things to learn too, which will naturally turn former guesses into certainties.
I think I've reached a point where 99% of games require no "risk", in the sense that I never have to click a tile unless I'm sure it won't kill me.
There are a lot of patterns to find, and logic tools to use to map out the game. But I think the biggest piece is strategy: surviving and/or getting a high score without guessing requires that you explore as much of the map as you can while using as few health scrolls as possible. This allows you to find the gold, gnome, and necromancer to boost your mas health before using up most of your health scrolls.
You can explore without using health by marking the values of tiles and *not clicking them*, but instead using them to determine the value of neighboring tiles. You click any zero value tiles, and continue until you can't anymore. Then you click the lowest-cost tile that will bring you closer to the next corner you haven't explored yet. Repeat.
Was a bit lost when I first started playing but eventually I figured it out and now whenever I have a spare 5-10 mins I find myself launching the game
Amazing game. Took me a while to beat it, but I did it!
I DID IT
Next step!
Yep! I got that too afterwards as well as max score! Tho how did you even get that ending without getting max anyways
I did not kill the lovers, the egg and rats. weirdly the rat king does not count
I barely just got the rat achievement alone (my last one). It was tough. Getting 3 at once ... that seems insanely difficult, even with some luck.
I tried repeatedly to get the rat king in the first two/three turns. After a while i got it and from there, i was really, really careful.
I don't think I will try it again though.
Very nice take on minesweeper! :D Took a moment to take in how everything worked and eventually I found myself attempting a 2/3 chance to dodge the last mine...but failed ;u;
I persevered on the very next run after though, and managed to get my first win! Satisfying stuffssss 💙
fixed.
I think this combo is the hardest achievement, great job!
Rat pacifist is too random for me to want to try it again. It's ironic that the game is actually much less chance-based than minesweeper, but rat pacifist brings back that minesweeper risk factor. (I still think it's a great achievement to incentivize replayability).
Edit: I figured out the (ch)easier way to get it.
You can do harder, get the gnome before using any of the heart scrolls, it's an order of magnitude harder. (lets you kill everything with max health left over)
You could also do the above challenge without killing lovers, rats, or the egg.
did this stop working on mobile browsers (safari/chrome) for anyone else, it just has the fuzzy loading screen now, won't move past it... I hope it get's fixed soon
Yes, one of the recent version broke the game on safari for sure (including ios).
Chrome on ios is just a skin for safari, so breaking safari means breaking "Chrome(iOS)".
Whats everyones fastest full clear?
hello, twin!
finally sub 4min
sunk 10 hours into this game before I finally beat it. Couldn't do anything else, it had to be done.
I wish the music would not interrupt for such long pauses, because it totally slaps.
Nailed it. Caught the gnome before killing the mine king
Wow! This game is a blast! I don't think I've ever encountered a minesweeper variant before, so this was a real pleasure to play. Now I'm wanting to come up with my own variant haha!