Puzzle & Thinking Games · 33

Puzzle designers use symmetry as both help and misdirection; a repeated pattern can reveal structure or convince the player to assume two sides behave the same when they do not. A related fact is worth keeping: Minesweeper turns incomplete information into logic; a number does not reveal a mine, it reveals a constraint on several possible squares around it. Every elegant solution has an awkward ancestor made of guesses, dead ends and one unreasonable assumption.