Elemental Sweeper

The idea

A pocket deduction game — Minesweeper’s grid and its number system, but the thing you’re hunting isn’t safety, it’s four hidden element nodes: Air, Water, Earth, Fire. You can’t see them, and the numbers won’t point to them. What points to them is your attunement. Pick an element and every tile you open reports a single cardinal bearing toward that element’s node — a compass reading, not a map. SE. N. W. Two readings from two different tiles and you can triangulate roughly where a node sits; a third narrows it to a cell or two. Then you press it.

How it plays

Tap an element up top to attune to it — that’s free and you can switch as often as you like, so a single opened tile can hand you a bearing to every node in turn if you keep toggling. Clicking a tile costs one of your clicks, though, and that’s the whole economy of the game: the budget is tight, so every open has to earn its bearing. Find your attuned node and the compass quietly re-points to the nearest one still missing, so you’re never left without a scent. Press all four nodes before the clicks run out and you’ve won — and pressing a node you weren’t even aiming at still counts, so the occasional lucky stab is a gift, not a waste.

The catch is the mines. They’re real Minesweeper mines: every safe tile you open shows how many of the eight around it are armed, and reading those numbers is how you route a path that doesn’t end you. One wrong tile and the run is over — but you’re one button from a fresh board, no lives, no scolding. The one deliberate break from Minesweeper: opening a blank tile does not cascade the board open for you. No free territory. Each click reveals exactly one tile, so the map stays something you earn a square at a time.

What’s here

The full loop: a generated board with four element nodes and a field of mines, an eight-way attunement compass that re-targets as nodes fall, the classic adjacency numbers, a click budget, and win / loss states with a one-press restart. Everything’s wrapped in the usual juice — heraldic charges for the elements, a bearing arrow that pops and pulses from your last tile, particle bursts and sparkles on every find, counters that punch, a node-glow when one’s uncovered. Difficulty lives in a single CONFIG block at the top of the file — grid size, mine count, click budget, and whether mines end the run or merely cost you the tile — so the whole feel is a few numbers away from wherever you want it.