Mines Gambling Game: How It Works, the Odds and the Multipliers

Mines is a casino mini game played on a grid of hidden tiles. Some tiles hide stars (or gems), the rest hide mines. Every star you open raises your multiplier, you can cash out after any pick, and one mine ends the round with the stake lost. It sits in the same family as crash games and Plinko: one simple decision, repeated, with the maths fully visible. This guide explains the rules, how the multipliers are calculated, and the exact odds behind them.

How Mines works

The version made by Spribe, the studio behind Aviator, shows the usual layout:

• A 5 × 5 grid of 25 tiles.
• You choose how many mines are hidden before the round: 1 to 20 in Spribe’s game (3 by default).
• You set a stake and open tiles one at a time. Each star raises the multiplier shown on screen as “Next”.
• You can cash out after any star and take stake × current multiplier. Hit a mine and the stake is lost.
• Spribe publishes a return to player (RTP) of 97% for Mines.

Other studios run the same idea with their own grid, mine range and RTP, so always read the info screen of the version you open.

How the multiplier is calculated

With m mines on 25 tiles, the chance that your first tile is a star is (25 − m) / 25. The chance of k stars in a row is:

P(k stars) = C(25 − m, k) ÷ C(25, k)

A fair game would pay 1 ÷ P. A game with a 97% RTP pays 0.97 ÷ P. Spribe’s demo matches this exactly: with 3 mines the first star shows 1.10x (0.97 ÷ 22/25), and with 20 mines it shows 4.85x (0.97 ÷ 5/25).

The odds for the common settings

Notice the pairs: 3 mines and 5 stars has the same chance (49.6%) and the same multiplier as 5 mines and 3 stars. The game is symmetric in that way.

Does any setting or cash-out point give better odds?

No. Multiply any row’s chance by its multiplier and you get 0.97: whether you take 1.10x at 88% or 17.16x at 5.7%, the long-run return is 97% of what you stake, and the house keeps 3%. The number of mines and the point where you cash out change how often you win and how much, not the average result. That makes the choice a question of how much swing you are comfortable with, nothing more. Read more on house edge.

Two common beliefs do not hold up:

• “Corners are safer” or other patterns. Each round places the mines at random; no tile position is more likely to be safe.
• “A mine is due”. Rounds are independent. A run of losses does not make the next round safer.

Some in-house versions, such as the originals at crypto casinos, are provably fair: you can check after the round that the mine positions were fixed before you played.

Where to play Mines

22bet lists around 50 Mines titles in its casino lobby, from studios including Hacksaw Gaming (Mines, Mines Supreme), Pragmatic Play (Mines+), JILI (Mines, Mines Gold, Mines Grand), Turbo Games and BGaming (Minesweeper XY). Grids, mine ranges and RTPs differ between them, so the multipliers in the table above apply to a 97% game only. BC.GAME has its own Mines among its BC Originals games, alongside Crash, Plinko, Limbo and Dice.

Play responsibly

Mines is fast, and a round takes seconds, which makes it easy to play far more rounds than planned. Set a budget and a time limit before you start, never raise stakes to win back losses, and treat it as paid entertainment. Gambling is for adults 18+ only.