Mines is Minesweeper with money on it, minus the little numbers that make Minesweeper solvable. You choose how many mines to hide on a 5x5 grid (anywhere from 1 to 24), set your bet and start clicking. Each safe tile pays a slightly higher multiplier than the one before. Hit a mine and the round ends with nothing. You can cash out after any safe click.
It's a single-player game against the house, it's quick, and unlike most games on these sites it hands you a real decision on every click. That decision just isn't the one most players think it is.
Where the multipliers come from
With 3 mines on 25 tiles, your first click is safe 22 times out of 25, or 88%. A fair game would pay 1 ÷ 0.88 = 1.14x for surviving it. Your second click is safe 21 times out of the remaining 24, the third 20 out of 23, and so on. Multiply those together and you get the chance of surviving any number of clicks. The site then shaves its edge off the fair multiplier.
Here's the 3-mine board with a 3% edge, which is our example figure. Check the real number on whichever site you play.
| Safe clicks | Chance to get there | Fair multiplier | With a 3% edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 88.0% | 1.14x | 1.10x |
| 2 | 77.0% | 1.30x | 1.26x |
| 3 | 67.0% | 1.49x | 1.45x |
| 4 | 57.8% | 1.73x | 1.68x |
| 5 | 49.6% | 2.02x | 1.96x |
| 6 | 42.1% | 2.37x | 2.30x |
| 8 | 29.6% | 3.38x | 3.28x |
So five safe clicks with 3 mines is slightly worse than a coinflip and pays slightly under 2x. Every row offers the same trade: a 97% return, packaged at a different level of risk.
No click is the right time to stop
Players agonize over whether to take 1.96x or push for one more tile. The math says it doesn't matter. Cash out after five clicks and your expected return is 49.6% × 1.96, about 97%. Push on to eight and it's 29.6% × 3.28, about 97% again. Every stopping point carries the same edge.
What changes is the variance, and that's a personal call. The useful habit is choosing your target before the round starts. The decision you make with 2x on screen and your cursor hovering over the cash-out button is rarely the one you'd make with a clear head.
The extreme settings
At one end, 24 mines leaves a single safe tile. You have a 4% chance of finding it, and a fair payout would be 25x. With a 3% edge it's about 24.25x. That's a lottery ticket with a nicer interface.
At the other end, one mine means your first click is safe 96% of the time and pays about 1.01x. You'll win constantly and barely notice, until a single loss takes back about a hundred of those wins. Neither setting is smarter than the other. They're two ends of the same curve.
Variants you'll come across
The 5x5 grid is the standard, but now and then you'll find a smaller or larger board. The math doesn't change: swap 25 for the new tile count and the same formula prices every click. Most mines games also have a random-pick button and an auto mode that opens a preset number of tiles and cashes out on its own. Towers, which some sites run as a separate game, is the same idea built as a ladder. Each row has a few tiles with one or more traps hidden among them, and you climb a row at a time with the multiplier rising as you go.
Corners, patterns and other superstitions
Spend ten minutes in any CS2 site's chat and you'll hear about mines "strategies": always start in the corners, go diagonal, avoid the tile that got you last round. None of it matters. On a provably fair game the mine positions are set by the server seed, your client seed and the nonce before you click anything, so every hidden tile has exactly the same chance of being a mine. When the round ends, the board shows you where the mines were, and you can verify that layout against the seeds using the method in our provably fair guide.
Where to play mines
Clash.gg and CSGORoll are the highest-rated sites on our list that run mines, and both have the usual originals (crash, plinko) alongside it. CSGOBig is a good third choice with one of the widest game lists we've reviewed. Whichever you pick, look for a multiplier table you can see for each mine count before you bet, a round history where you can open past boards and their seeds, and clear rules on the maximum payout per round.
Habits to drop
Mines is easy to play for an hour without noticing the time, and most bad sessions come from playing longer and faster than planned. Every site we review is 18+ only, and our responsible gambling guide for CS2 players has practical ways to slow things down. The habits we'd drop first:
- Raising the mine count after a loss to win it all back in one click.
- Running auto-pick at full speed. Mines is quick enough already.
- Deciding a board is "hot" because the last three rounds went well.
- Playing bonus balance without reading the wagering rules first (our bonus codes and wagering guide explains what to check).