How to play Mines

Also called Mines drinking game · Minesweeper drinking game · Bomb game
2–15 players

Twenty-five shut boxes and one turn each. Open one and pass it on - the board gets smaller every go, and so do your odds.

On a drinking table the boxes hide mines, and the first one found ends the round: that player drinks, and picks Truth or Dare if the table plays it. In the pot game it runs the other way - one treasure, and whoever finds it takes everything.

Play Mines free

How to play

Twenty-five boxes, face down, and the table takes turns. On your go you open one - any one still shut - and then it passes on. Nobody opens two in a row, and nobody can open a box that is already open.

That is the whole game, and the tension is arithmetic: the first player has one chance in twenty-five of finding what is buried, and the last has considerably worse. Which is why the player who starts changes every round.

The drinking game

The host buries one to four mines. The first player to open one drinks, and the round ends there and then - whatever else is still buried.

More mines does not mean more people drink. It means somebody finds one sooner: with one mine a round can run most of the way round the table, and with four it rarely gets far. Exactly one person loses a round, however many are down there.

The rest of the board is turned over afterwards, so the table can see the mines were where they were before anybody touched anything.

Truth or Dare

Switch it on and whoever hits a mine picks Truth or Dare and is given one prompt, drawn from whichever decks the host has turned on. Everybody at the table sees which they picked and what they got - that is the point of playing it in a room rather than off a list.

They get one re-draw, and the prompt stays up until everybody at the table says to move on. Nothing is on a clock, so a dare is never taken off the screen while it is still being done.

Playing for a pot

The same board, the opposite game. Everybody puts the same in before a box is opened, one treasure is buried, and whoever finds it takes the whole pot.

If the board runs out without anybody finding it, every stake goes back where it came from. A round nobody won is a round that did not happen.

Random pick

There is a button that opens a box for you. It is worth exactly as much as choosing one yourself - the boxes are shuffled fresh each round and none of them is more likely than any other - and it exists for the same reason people cut a deck: sometimes you would rather not be the one who decided.