Minesweeper and Tetris combine in Minesweeper Tetris, free on Steam

While I procrastinate as hard as the next desk jockey, in truth I've never had the patience for Minesweeper. It doesn't have the fast pace and stunning climax of Solitaire, y'know? So what if we jazz it up by smashing in another puzzle game. Like in Minesweeper Tetris, released for free on Steam this morning, which kinda adds Tetris by making the screen slowly fill in with fresh lines of mines, challenging you to clear mines quickly. It twists my melon, man.

I don't think I'm very good at Minesweeper or Tetris, and I'm certainly not good at a combination of the two. It is a lot to get your head around.

In the usual Minesweeper way, you're trying to uncover mines hidden on a grid by deducing their locations from the numbers which indicate how many mines are in adjacent squares. And kinda-ish like in Tetris, the play space is slowly filling up, so you have to clear lines before it does. Rather than slotting blocks into holes to fill lines, here you clear a line by finding every mine in it. You start out with a blank space above your mine grid, which slowly becomes filled with new lines (hiding new mines). And if you detonate a mine, it instantly adds a whole new line. So your task is to find mines carefully but quickly.

Yeah, it's all cheap and cheerful, especially that midi music, but it's a free Minesweeper variant. I'm quite charmed by it. Feels like a freeware game I might have got off a cover disc with cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer in the late 90s.

And as much as it is a combination of two games I'm bad at, I did pause writing this post several times to play a bit more. I want to figure this out.

You can grab Minesweeper Tetris free from Steam for Windows. Given that it uses the Tetris name, I expect it won't be long before lawyers start sending letters. If you want it, get it while you can. Though the source is on GitHub so you could always download and compile it yourself.