Dragonsweeper is a free, neat and nifty RPG take on a venerable PC puzzler

Still a few mines in there somewhere

The last Minesweeperalike I wrote up was a sparkling slurry of mind-altering pop-ups and resinous AI cleavage. It was David Cronenberg's Minesweeper: The Substance Edition, and I was sincerely worried that I'd put you all off Minesweeper for life. But before you mop your last munition and turn in your index finger for good, give Dragonsweeper a try. It's Minesweeper with an altogether less atrocious twist which you can hopefully deduce from the name.

That's right, Dragonsweeper is Minesweeper but an RPG. It's a smart genre hybrid that gives the principle of tentatively clicking blank squares to reveal nearby mines a level-up system, and swaps (most of) the mines for monsters like walking skeletons, gremlins and, yes, dragons. I know, I know: giving hitherto unencumbered games a progression mechanic is cultural vandalism, but trust me, it's more charming than you might guess.

Uncleared tiles near the exposed play area have numbers on them. In regular Minesweeper, these indicate the number of explosives nearby, but there's a little more to it here. Part of Dragonsweeper's fun, of course, is working out how, exactly, developer Daniel Benmergui has glued all these archetypes together, so I won't say anything further. If you're stuck, though, there's a manual with a bestiary.

You can play Dragonsweeper in a browser right here. Thanks very much to Maw feeder Titus Groen for passing this on. It has swallowed up a couple of my teabreaks, though I've yet to actually clear the board. If you prefer vanilla Minesweeper, here's a little lookback from Matthew Castle (RPS in peace).