0.1.3, SCAN THE NETWORK
There's a third game in Crash The Stack! SCAN is Minesweeper, and you'll find it in FREE PLAY, right under DEFRAG.
If you've played Windows Minesweeper, you already know how to play. You're port-scanning a segment of Gibson's network: every cell is a host, and scanning one gives you a reading, the number of ICE among its eight neighbors. Flag the hosts you think are ICE, and clear every clean host to map the segment. Scan ICE and the board is over, and RETRY LINK deals you a fresh segment of the same size.
Here's the part I care about most: no board ever needs a guess. Every segment is checked before you see it, by a solver that only uses what you can see on the screen, so the whole board can always be worked out from the numbers. Windows promised a safe first click and then sometimes left you with a coin flip at the end. SCAN won't do that to you. Your first click is always clean too, and it always opens up an area to work from.
There are Windows' three sizes, with our names on them: LAN (9x9, 10 ICE), WAN (16x16, 40) and BACKBONE (30x16, 99). The SIZE row remembers your pick. There's a DAILY BOARD too, a WAN board that's the same for everyone each day, with its own streak on the HIGH SCORES screen, and your best time for each size goes up there as well.
On a desktop it plays the way you'd expect: left-click scans, right-click flags, and clicking a number whose flags are all placed sweeps the rest of its neighbors. The keyboard works as well: arrows or hjkl to move, Space or Enter to scan, F to flag, and N to jump to the next host worth looking at.
On a phone, tap to scan and long-press to flag. If you'd rather not time a long press, the FLAG button at the bottom right switches taps to flagging. Tap a number to sweep. The two bigger boards are too fine to tap on a phone screen, so they open as a map: tap where you want to work and it zooms in, and the MAP button takes you back out.
This is the classic version for now. The HACKER version, where scanning ICE spikes the trace instead of ending the run and the ICE fights back, comes next, and then SCAN joins the nodes you hack in JACK IN.
A few smaller things: a shared link to the site now shows a picture of the game instead of the app icon, and a link to a page that doesn't exist gets a proper "not found" page instead of the front page. The game is also about a third of the size it was, so it loads much faster, especially on a phone.