CafeSweeper Help Page

Objective of the Game

There are two gauges at the top of the applet. One measures time in seconds and time starts counting down after you clear the first square and the board sets itself up. The other gauge actually indicates the total number of mines minus how many cups are marked and is thus not reliable. If you mark squares that are not cups, this measure will be wrong. You only win if you clear every square that is not a Cup of Coffee.

How to Play

Note that the game makes two guarantees to you:
1) The first square you click on will never contain a mine.
2) Regardless of what you select, there will never be more mines than half the number of squares on the board.

I have updated the controls so that they should work well for those with single mouse buttons and multiple mouse buttons. Note that if you press several different modifier keys simultaneously, I make no guarantess about the result. Keep it simple. You actually can win the game with only one button and not using the modifier keys at all but it is generally faster and easier if you learn to use all the controls.

Square	Result Square	Action	Result
	through or or	Click left/only mouse button	Clears square to find blank square, numbered sqare, or mine (if Cup of Java is found you lose).
		Shift-Click, Meta-Click, or click right mouse button	Flags a suspected Cup of Coffee.
		Shift-Click, Meta-Click, or click right mouse button	Un-Flags a suspected Cup of Coffee.
through	Same but squares around may change.	Ctrl-Click, Alt-Click, or click middle mouse button	Clears around a numbered square. This only works if a number of Flags equal to the number in the square are adjacent to the sqaure. If any of the Flags are misplaced, this can discover a Cup of Coffee and cause you to lose.
Any square	No Change	Ctrl-Shift-Click	Does nothing.
Any Square	No Change	Any action not listed	Does nothing.

Using the menus and button
You can control the size of the board and the number of mines using the menus at the bottom of the game. Selecting any of the menu items resets the game. Note also that if you select a board configuration and number of mines such that there would be more than 1 mine for every 2 squares, the game automatically reduces the number of mines to be the number of squares over 2 (selecting a 10x10 board (100 squares) and 200 mines would actually give you a 10x10 board with 50 mines).

Clicck on the Register Name button at the top of the applet and enter your name in the window that appears in order to be eligible for the High Score List (added 8/23/96). Enter your name in the window and press return and your name will appear as the label for the button. Note that high scores are currently only kept for the primary three settings of game parameters (15 cups with a 10x10 grid, 75 cups with a 25x20 grid, and 200 cups with a 40x25 grid).

Winning and Losing
If you lose, you will be shown the entire board. The Cup of Coffee you hit to lose the game will be highlighted in red.
Either way, an image will appear indicated that you have won or lost. To begin a new game, click on the win/loss image. Using one of the menus will also cause a new game to start.

Performance issues
Be patient while the images initially load. Once all the images have been loaded, the game should play very quickly. If you find the game to be unacceptably slow, send me mail (aarondf@bu.edu) giving me an idea of just how slow it is and what seems to be the bottleneck and I will consider working on trying to speed things up even more.

Game Development

Written by Aaron Douglass Fuegi (aarondf@bu.edu), proprietor of the Last Homely House.

Version History
2/15/96 Version 1.0 Released
3/29/96 Optimized for speed
4/24/96 Name changed due to Sun's objections.
5/23/96 Support for multiple mouse buttons added.
8/23/96 High Score List added.

Note: This game was previously called JavaSweeper but Sun objected to the use of the word Java and so it was renamed CafeSweeper.

Access Count:

Back to the CafeSweeper applet or to Aaron's Java Page.