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.