Ivanche Minesweeper
I've been playing a version of minesweeper called Ivanche Minesweeper lately (you can scale the board to be as big or as small as you want on your monitor). It is clearly a "time waster" and there have been times recently (like having the plumber or technician right outside my study window) where the best thing i could do is wait. Nonetheless, the MASTER level is a bit frustrating.
The above is the position I found myself a few minutes ago. I must confess I was playing it because I was nervous starting on 4 pages of webcomics. I was quite happy to get down from 180 unknown mines to just 5. I consider to have less than 100 left a good game, and I have never got them all at this level. Smaller boards, yes, but not this one. And here's the same game two turns later:
OOPS! The problem with minesweeper is that there are positions where one cannot solely by deductive reasoning, find the remaining mines. For example, there was no way I could have predicted the mine in the top right corner. And without knowing if there was a mine there or not, the situation in the lower left corner was indeterminate. I had to guess, and guess wrong. Tempted to thing that this reflects life sometimes. Sometimes you just have to take a guess, and sometimes you fuck-up.
However, either way, it has primed me for doing those webcomic pages. Excuse me while I pop off and start right now.