Mines is a simple yet widely recognised online casino game. You choose how many mines to hide across a 5x5 grid, then reveal tiles one by one. Each safe pick raises the multiplier, but uncover a mine before you cash out and you lose your stake.
In this guide, we'll show you how to play Mines, with our own MetaWin Mines as the worked example. We'll take you through the mines gambling game from your first bet to cash-out, then compare what different mine counts pay so you can read the potential return.
What is the Mines gambling game?
If you think you've seen this setup before, it's probably from Minesweeper, the puzzle that came free with Windows PCs for years. That game gave Mines its board, but casinos added the stake and the multiplier, which is how it ended up sharing lobby space with dice and crash.
Built by MetaWin Studios, our own MetaWin Mines Original brings mines gambling to a 5x5 grid, with wins capped at $500,000. Under the mines game rules, you choose how many of the 25 tiles hide mines before your first click, anywhere from 1 to 24, and gems fill the rest.
Fewer mines give you a higher chance of finding a gem, while more mines raise the multiplier for each safe pick.
Anyone who remembers Minesweeper will spot the missing number clues straight away. In the PC game, each revealed square without a mine showed how many mines lay next to it, so you could reason your way across the board. Tiles in the minesweeper gambling version show only a gem or a mine, which means every pick is a matter of chance.
Author's Thoughts
Matija Antic
Without Minesweeper's number clues, every pick in Mines is a matter of chance, so the decisions that are really yours are the mine count and when to cash out.
How do you play Mines, step by step?
Chance takes over once you start clicking, but the setup is all yours, and these five steps show how to play Mines game rounds at MetaWin Casino.
Step 1: Connect your wallet and deposit crypto
Your MetaWin Casino balance runs on crypto, so start on the Deposit tab of the Cashier. Pick Web3 Wallet to connect a self-custody wallet, or Transfer Crypto if your coins sit on an exchange. Transfer Crypto hands you a deposit address for the coin you choose, and the network you send on has to be the one chosen in the Cashier, or the transfer can fail to land.
If you don't hold crypto yet, Card Deposit lets you pay by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay and receive crypto such as USDT, while Direct Crypto connects to more than 100 exchanges and wallets through Mesh.
Step 2: Open MetaWin Mines and set your bet
With funds in place, head to the Mines hub, where you can play Mines games at MetaWin. On MetaWin Mines, keep Manual selected, then enter a stake in Bet Amount. Use 1/2 or 2x to halve or double it, or Max to set it at the maximum.
Step 3: Choose how many mines
Below your stake, the Mines dropdown lets you decide how many tiles hide a mine for this round. Choose your number, press Bet, and Bet Amount and Mines grey out for as long as the round runs.
Step 4: Reveal tiles one at a time
Manual mode leaves every click to you, so tap any tile to open it or press Pick random tile to let the game choose. Green gems mark your safe picks, and the Gems field next to Mines keeps track of the gems left on the board. Total profit shows what you would gain if you cashed out at any given moment, with the current multiplier beside it in brackets. It excludes your original stake, so a 0.1 bet at roughly 1.45x offers about 0.045 profit and 0.145 back in total.
Step 5: Cash out or hit a mine
Press Cashout to collect your stake multiplied by the current multiplier. If a mine turns up first, it explodes on the tile you picked and the round closes with no payout. After either ending, the full board turns over so you can see where the mines were, and Bet comes back for the next go.
How do mines, multipliers and payouts work?
Picture a round with 5 mines hidden among the 25 tiles. Your first pick has a 20 out of 25 chance of finding a gem. After one safe reveal, the next has 19 out of 24, and after two, the third has 18 out of 23. Multiply 20/25 × 19/24 × 18/23 and the chance of clearing all three comes to about 49.6%.
At 97% RTP, the game keeps 3% of what a perfectly even payout would be as its house edge. Dividing 0.97 by the chance of clearing all three tiles puts the mines multiplier at about 1.96x. Every figure you see in brackets during a round comes from that same calculation. With 3 mines and three safe picks, it gives roughly 1.45x, matching the multiplier used in step 4.
If you've already learned how to play crypto dice at MetaWin, the method will feel familiar, since Dice also divides its RTP by your chance of winning. Across four mine counts, our mines payout chart lists the multipliers after one, three, five and ten safe picks, all at MetaWin's 97% RTP.
| Mines | 1 safe pick | 3 safe picks | 5 safe picks | 10 safe picks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1.01x | 1.10x | 1.21x | 1.62x |
| 3 | 1.10x | 1.45x | 1.96x | 4.90x |
| 5 | 1.21x | 1.96x | 3.32x | 17.16x |
| 10 | 1.62x | 4.90x | 17.16x | 1,055.84x |
Pairs line up neatly, such as 5 mines with 3 safe picks and 3 mines with 5 safe picks, which both pay 1.96x because the chance of clearing either sequence is identical. At the far end, 1,055.84x for 10 mines and ten safe picks reflects a much rarer outcome, with only about a 0.09% chance of clearing all ten, roughly 1 in 1,090 attempts.
Author's Thoughts
Matija Antic
Two very different setups can pay exactly the same multiplier, because what Mines really prices is your chance of clearing the sequence, not the number of mines on its own.
Autoplay and beginner tips
Beside the Manual tab at the top of the panel, Auto repeats one setup round after round. Click the tiles you want Autobet to reveal, and they turn purple. You then choose a Number of bets for a fixed run, or use 0 for an open-ended run, and press Start Autobet. Stop Autobet lets you end either run manually.
Before you start, decide how much you're prepared to lose and use Stop On Loss to set that limit. Stop On Profit lets you end the run once you're ahead by an amount you choose. With mines for beginners, our advice is to start with a low mine count. That way, you can gain more experience with the controls and follow the multiplier without the round ending quite so often.
Seeing every mine once a round ends can tempt you to read patterns into the board, but the game scatters the mines at random before your first click, so the previous round tells you nothing about the next. Whatever mine count, tiles or Autobet settings you choose, the 3% house edge applies to every round and nothing guarantees a profit, so keep play within the budget you set.
How do you know a Mines round is fair?
Every mine on the final board had its spot before you placed the bet. MetaWin builds that layout from its server seed, your client seed and a nonce, and shows its part in hashed form in advance, so any change afterwards would break the match.
Once you move to a new seed pair, the Fairness panel reveals the original server seed. Hash it again and it should match the value you saw before your bet. Then use that seed with your client seed and nonce to recreate the board. Every mine should land exactly where the round revealed it. Our guide to how provably fair games work walks you through both checks.
Which other Mines games can you try at MetaWin?
MetaWin Mines isn't the only game from this family you can find on our site. If you want to try out a major provider's take, Hacksaw Mines gives you more say over the board itself, with grids from 3x3 to 9x9 and a custom mine count alongside the presets.
TaDa's Mines Gold takes you underground, where gold nuggets raise your prize and dynamite ends the round, while a Bonus chest above the board offers an extra win. Gaming Corps took the idea to ancient Greece with Raging Zeus Mines, whose ancient coins push the multiplier higher until a snake shows up.
You'll find the full line-up in the Mines hub.
