Stake Mines: how it works, multipliers and odds

Stake Mines is a grid game inspired by the classic Minesweeper, but without the clues. The board has 25 tiles in a 5×5 grid. Before the round you choose how many mines to hide, from 1 to 24. The rest are gems. Each time you reveal a gem your multiplier rises; reveal a mine and the round ends and the bet is lost. You can cash out after any gem.

Unlike Dice or Limbo, where one click settles the bet, Mines makes you decide again after every tile. That is what makes it engaging, and also what makes it easy to push one click too far. The numbers below show exactly how much each extra click costs in risk.

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1. Set your bet amount.
2. Choose the number of mines in the Mines selector (1–24). The more mines, the bigger the multiplier per gem.
3. Click Bet to start the round. The board is now fixed: mine positions are set before your first click.
4. Reveal tiles one at a time by clicking them, or use Pick random tile. After each gem, the next multiplier and total payout are shown.
5. Cash out at any time after at least one gem to collect your bet times the current multiplier.
6. Hit a mine and the round ends; the full board is revealed so you can see where every mine was.

If you reveal every gem on the board, the round cashes out automatically at the maximum multiplier for that mine count.

The chance of surviving a click depends on how many safe tiles are left compared with how many tiles are left in total. With 3 mines, your first click is safe 22 times out of 25 (88%). If it is a gem, the second click is safe 21 times out of 24 (87.5%), and so on. Multiply those together and you get the chance of surviving the whole sequence.

The multiplier is the fair payout for that survival chance, reduced by 1%:

Multiplier = 0.99 ÷ chance of revealing that many gems in a row

That is why the multiplier climbs faster the further you go: each step gets riskier, because the remaining mines make up a larger share of the remaining tiles.

Multiplier and survival chance by mine count

Multipliers are calculated from the formula above and match what the game shows; small rounding differences are possible. Multiply any multiplier by its chance and you always get about 0.99. That is the house edge at work: every combination of mine count and cash-out point has the same 99% expected return.

Same odds, different routes

Notice that 3 mines and 5 gems and 5 mines and 3 gems land on exactly the same trade-off: 2.00× at a 49.6% chance. Likewise 10 mines and 3 gems matches 3 mines and 10 gems at 5.00× and 19.8%. Choosing more mines and fewer clicks, or fewer mines and more clicks, changes how the round feels, not what it is worth.

Mines' Auto mode works differently from instant games. You select the tiles you want revealed on the board first, then set:

• Number of Bets to run.
• On Win / On Loss: reset to base or increase the bet by a percentage.
• Stop on Profit / Stop on Loss for the run as a whole.

Each auto round reveals your chosen tiles. If none of them hides a mine, the round cashes out at the multiplier for that number of gems; if any of them does, the round is lost. Because the mine positions are random each round, which tiles you pick makes no difference — only how many. Selecting five tiles with 3 mines is a 2× bet at a 49.6% chance every time, wherever the five tiles are.

Patterns and "safe" tiles

Corners, edges, diagonals, the centre, the tiles that were safe last round. None of them is safer. Mines are placed at random for each round from the provably fair seeds, and every unrevealed tile has exactly the same chance of hiding a mine.

One click, many mines

Setting 24 mines and clicking one tile for a 24.75× payout at a 4% chance. It is a legitimate high-variance bet with the same 99% expected return as any other, and long losing runs are normal: about a 44% chance of twenty losses in a row.

Low mines, long runs

With 1 mine, clicking ten tiles pays 1.65× at a 60% chance. Players like the sense of control, but it is the same trade-off as a 1.65× Limbo target.

Cashing out after a loss streak "because it is due"

Previous boards have no effect on the next one. A run of early mines does not make the next board easier.

Progressive betting

Increasing the stake after each loss so that a win recovers it. It is Martingale with extra clicks and fails the same way, when a losing streak outlasts the balance or the bet limit.

Nothing here shifts the 1% edge. What you can control is variance: how many mines, how many clicks, how big the stake.

Every Mines board is generated from the same provably fair inputs as Stake's other Originals:

1. Server seed (hashed) — shown before you play so Stake cannot change it later.
2. Client seed — set by you in the Fairness settings.
3. Nonce — counts your bets on the current seed pair.

The three values feed a published HMAC-SHA256 process that produces a sequence of numbers used to shuffle the 25 tile positions and place the mines. After you rotate your seed pair, Stake reveals the previous server seed. You can then confirm that its hash matches the one you saw and rebuild any past board, mine for mine, using Stake's documented method or an independent verifier.

Because the board is fixed when you click Bet, it does not matter how fast or slow you click, or which tile you start with. Our glossary explains seeds, hashes and nonces in plain terms.

• Decide the cash-out point before the round. "Five gems, then cash out" is a plan; "see how it goes" is how rounds end on a mine.
• Use the table, not instinct. Knowing that 5 mines and 5 gems is a 29% chance stops it feeling like a near-certainty.
• Size the stake for the variance you pick. High mine counts need smaller stakes and longer budgets.
• Use Auto with a fixed tile count if you find yourself pushing for one more click.
• Bank wins in the Vault so a good run is not given straight back.

If Mines stops feeling like entertainment, take a break. Stake's limits and self-exclusion options are covered on our responsible gambling page. 18+.