MineOnline

MineOnline is a free multiplayer minesweeper where everyone plays on the same board at the same time. Every tile you open becomes your territory, mines stun you instead of ending your game, and the biggest territory wins the round. It's the bigger successor to Mine Raiders, and the story of how I built it is in this post.

Features

• Rush: Up to 8 players race across one shared board, with a sabotage card draft between rounds.
• Rig & Run: Everyone secretly plants mines and traps, then races through the result to the exit.
• Drill Yard: Classic Beginner, Intermediate and Expert boards, timed on the server, with leaderboards and a daily minesweeper board.
• Ranked: 1v1 duels with an Elo rating.
• Human-like bots: They fill empty seats, misread numbers, tilt after a boom and are tuned to the players at the table.
• Friends and lobbies: Private lobbies with invite links, crews with live presence and a one-click join.
• A company town: Pixel-art scenes, crates of cosmetics, a play-money casino and housing, all generated by code.
• No account needed: Play as a guest instantly, save an account later to keep your progress.

Technical Details

A Bun server runs HTTP and WebSockets on a single small VPS and is fully authoritative: the client never knows where the mines are. SQLite stores accounts, matches, leaderboards and the economy. The client is Preact with signals and a Canvas 2D board renderer, built with Vite. Bots use a constraint solver with human limits (attention, misreads, moods, play styles), tuned per table and checked with a match simulator. Pixel art and chiptune audio are generated by Python scripts, analytics run on PostHog, and the guides on the site are server-rendered pages for search engines.