There Is No Edge: How Players Grow the Continents

Classic Minesweeper is a rectangle. Beginner is 9 by 9, Expert is 30 by 16, and when you reach the edge you are done. The Shared World of Minesweeper Worlds Online has no rectangle. Each season it starts as one landmass, the Origin Land, in the middle of an open sea, and every player digs outward from there at the same time.

What makes it a world rather than a very large board is what happens next. The map is not just revealed as you dig; it grows. Areas that players clear turn sea into land, and once enough of the world has been cleared, a whole new continent rises somewhere far away. The first person to reach it gets to name it, and that name is what everyone else sees on the map for the rest of the season.

When a continent is born

The rule is simple and shared by everyone: new continents appear when the total number of areas cleared by all players reaches the next milestone, and each milestone is twice the last. 500 areas, then 1,000, 2,000, 4,000, 8,000, 16,000. The game shows the countdown on screen ("14,449 / 16,000 to the next continent"), and when the moment arrives everybody gets the same message: a new continent has emerged.

Season 6 ran from September 28 to October 12, 2026. Here is when its continents appeared, counted from the start of the season:

• Gremlet, at 500 areas — 13 hours in.
• Asafa Powell, at 1,000 — 18 hours in.
• bumblebee, at 2,000 — 24 hours in.
• Tyson Gay, at 4,000 — day 2.8.
• Wonda, at 8,000 — day 5.0.
• りんこのしっぽ ("Rinko's tail"), at 16,000 — day 10.6.

The doubling is deliberate. The first three continents arrive in the first day, when the world is small and everyone is still close to home. After that each one has to be earned by twice as much work as the one before. The seventh would have needed 32,000 cleared areas. Season 6 ended at 20,825, so it never came.

Where it appears

A new continent does not appear next to where people are digging. It appears out in the open sea, and each one is placed further from the Origin Land than the last. In Season 6 the first was about 99 areas away (roughly 800 cells), and the sixth was 168 areas away (more than 1,300 cells). The game also keeps every new continent clear of all the continents before it, so the world spreads out in every direction instead of piling up in one corner.

There is one more rule, and we learned it the hard way. In an early season a continent was placed so close to an older one that, by the time it was born, players had already dug over the spot. Nobody ever got to discover it, so nobody named it. Now, if the place a continent is about to appear has already been explored, the game skips it and moves on to the next one. A new continent is always genuinely new land.

Each continent also has its own character. Apart from the Origin Land, every continent gets its own terrain mix: one may be mostly desert, another thick forest, another a chain of mountains. The rules and the meaning of the numbers stay the same, but the place looks different when you arrive, which is the point of going. The worlds page describes the terrain types.

The race to get there

When a continent is born, somebody has to travel to it, and travel in Minesweeper means clearing every area in between. Players start racing almost immediately. In Season 6 the first area near bumblebee was cleared six minutes after it appeared, and the first near Tyson Gay within 45 minutes. Gremlet took three hours. Wonda, born on day 5 in the far west, sat untouched for eleven and a half hours before anyone got there.

Once a continent has been reached, it becomes a second home. By the end of the season, 15 different players had cleared areas within 25 areas of Gremlet, together clearing 1,128 areas around it. The later continents drew fewer people, which is what the doubling intends: Wonda had 11 visitors and 239 cleared areas around it, and りんこのしっぽ, born on day 10, had 5.

You can see the race in the season map above. The teal shapes around each continent are the first settlers. The orange trails leading out to them are the later roads, dug to connect them to everything else.

Who names a continent

The name belongs to whoever finds the continent first. When you reach a newly born continent before anyone else, the game asks you to name it. You can type anything, or keep the default name. Then that name appears on the map for every player until the world ends.

The names say more about the players than anything else in the game. In Season 4, one player, Player_o1VOB2, reached every new continent first and named all six after chapters of The Tale of Genji: 浮舟 (Ukifune), 桐壺 (Kiritsubo), 柏木 (Kashiwagi), 夕顔 (Yūgao), 明石 (Akashi) and 空蝉 (Utsusemi). In Season 5 the same player found them all again and kept the default names.

Season 6 was more crowded. Gremby named Gremlet. だいすーしー found two continents and named both after Olympic sprinters, Asafa Powell and Tyson Gay. ykk chose bumblebee and KJ chose Wonda. The last one, りんこのしっぽ, "Rinko's tail", was named by rain — and in Season 7, rain found another and called it りんこのほっぺ, "Rinko's cheek". We do not know who Rinko is. We suspect a pet.

Season 7 so far has ガラパゴス諸島 (the Galápagos Islands, by Player_SASUKE), りんこのほっぺ (by rain), 犬小屋 ("the doghouse", by 椿), isopod (by meggu) and たけのこの里 (a Japanese chocolate snack, by Player_o1VOB2, who is still finding continents).

Watch it happen

Season 7 ends on October 26. On October 20 the world stood at 14,449 cleared areas, with the sixth continent due at 16,000. If the world keeps its pace, it will be born before the season ends, and somebody will get to name it.

You can replay Season 6 from its first area to its last on the season timelapse at https://minesweeperworlds.com/seasons/s6/ — every continent appears on the map at the moment it was born. Or go and dig the current world in your browser or the iPhone and Android app. The guide to the Shared World explains the rest, and this field note covers what happens when you fall on the way.