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                        LANDMINE

Landmine is a game in which you try to safely move step by step from the

top left corner of a square board to the bottom right corner of the board.

Scattered among the cells of the board are invisible mines which blow up

if you step on them.  When you step on a mine, one of your legs is blown

off, and if you lose both legs, then the game is over.

Steps are made one at a time from any cell you have already visited to

any of the eight possible cells which are adjacent to it.  At the start

of the game you are placed in the top left corner of the board, which is

guaranteed to have no mine in it.  There are also no mines immediately

adjacent to the starting cell.  There is also a guaranteed path from the

starting cell to the finishing cell which does not encounter any mines.

You cannot see the mines, however you have a detector which indicates

the presence of the mines.  The detector cannot locate the direction of

any individual mine, but it does indicate the number of mines immediately

adjacent to your cell.  By using this information from all the cells you

have already visited, you can usually deduce where the mines must be.

In this way, you can find your way safely to the destination cell.  Some

of the deductions that can be made are very subtle, and experience will

improve your scores dramatically.

When landmine is started up under mini-X, the board is displayed at the

left side, some buttons are displayed at the upper right, and some statistics

are displayed at the lower right.  To make a step, use the mouse to move the

cursor onto the cell that you wish to step on, and press a button.  A number

will appear in that square (if there is no mine there!) indicating now many

mines are adjacent to that square.  You can step onto any cell which is

adjacent to any cell you have already stepped on.

In order to help you deduce where the mines are and what steps are safe,

you can mark any non-visited cell as containing a mine.  To do this, move

the mouse to that cell, and then type a space.  A red circle will then

appear in that cell to indicate that you think it contains a mine.  A

side effect of doing this is that you cannot accidentally step on the

square while it is marked.  Notice that the cell is marked as you request

whether or not a mine is actually there, thus if you mistakenly mark a

cell, you are likely to get confused and later step on a real mine!  If

you think that a cell is marked in error, you can clear the marking by

moving the mouse to the cell and then typing another space.

If you step on a mine, you will hear a beep, and a red circle will flash

on and off for a few seconds to indicate that the mine has exploded.

Then the mine will be removed, and the counts in the adjacent cells

will be adjusted to reflect the new situation with one less mine.  Your

number of legs is also reduced by 1, and the cursor shape is changed to

indicate this.  If you lose both legs, then the game is lost.  If you

successfully make it to the lower right corner, then the game is won.

When the game is over, the location of all mines are marked with red circles.

In addition, if you had marked cells as containing mines, but the cells were

wrongly marked, then those cells are shown with green circles.  After you

have analyzed the results of the game, you can start a new game by using

the NEW GAME button.

The three buttons on the top right of the screen are QUIT, SAVE GAME,

and NEW GAME.  The buttons are activated by moving the cursor to the

interior of the button, and pressing any mouse button.  No confirmation

is asked for these actions.

QUIT will immediately quit playing and return you to text mode and exit.

However, if you had started landmine with a filename to restore from,

then the current status will be saved back to that file.  If you had not

supplied a filename on starting, and have not saved the game using the

SAVE GAME button, then QUIT will quit without saving anything.

SAVE GAME is used to save the current status of the game without exiting.

This lets you make sure that the game is saved away when you have been

playing for a long time and are worried about crashes.  If you had given

a file for restoring of previous games, then the game will be saved back

into that file.  If you had not specified a filename, then a default name

of "landmine.save" will be used.  If the save operation works, the button

will momentarily flash.  If the save operation fails, then a beep will

be sounded.

NEW GAME is used to start a new game.  This button can only be used after

a game has just been completed.  That is, after both legs have been blown

off or you have reached the destination cell, you use this button to

begin another game.

When starting landmine, you can specify some options on the command line.

The options are the following:

        landmine [-s n] [-m n] [savefile]

The savefile is the filename to save the game into when the SAVE GAME or

QUIT buttons are used, as described above.

The -s option sets the size of the board.  The size is the number of cells

across the board, and also down the board.  The board size can be set to

any size from 3 to 30.  The default size is 15.

The -m option sets the number of mines on the board.  This can be set from

1 to 50% of the number of cells on the board.  The default number of mines

is 15% of the number of cells on the board.  For the default board size,

the default number of mines is 33.

The statistics saved in the save file are kept for each combination of

board size and mines, thus you can play with many different combinations

of values and the statistics will be kept separately.  There is a limit

of 1000 different combinations that can be saved.

You cannot change the board size or number of mines while a game is in

progress.  To change the parameters, finish the game, save the game into a

file and exit, then restart landmine giving the new parameters.