MAGAWA
Minesweeper, starring the real hero rat who sniffed out 100+ landmines and explosives in Cambodia. Reveal the safe ground, flag every mine, and clear the field.
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Use the arrow keys to move between tiles, Enter or Space to have Magawa sniff a tile, and F to plant or remove a flag. Your first sniff is always safe.
🍌 Best —
How to play
- Tap a tile to have Magawa sniff it. A number is how many of the 8 neighbouring tiles hide a landmine.
- Blank tiles are all-clear and open up their whole safe pocket at once. Your first sniff is always safe.
- Flag a mine: right-click on a computer, or turn on Flag mode (or long-press a tile) on a phone.
- Tap a number to clear around it: flag all the mines it's touching first, then a tap reveals every other neighbour at once. Tap before you've flagged them and it just flashes the tiles it's counting.
- Clear every safe tile to win Magawa a shower of bananas 🍌. Step on a live mine and it's over.
- R starts a fresh field, F toggles flag mode. Tap the rat in the scoreboard to restart any time.
- Keyboard: arrow keys move between tiles, Enter or Space sniffs the highlighted tile, and F plants a flag on it.
Who was Magawa?
Magawa was a real African giant pouched rat, trained by the non-profit APOPO to sniff out landmines left behind after war. Over about five years in Cambodia he found more than 100 buried explosives — 71 landmines and 38 other items of unexploded ordnance, helping clear over 225,000 square metres of land so families could safely farm and walk to school. Light enough that he never set off a mine, he could search a tennis-court-sized area in about 30 minutes — work that can take a person with a metal detector up to four days.
In 2020 he became the first rat to receive the PDSA Gold Medal for animal bravery. He retired in 2021 and passed away in 2022, around 8 years old.
APOPO's “HeroRATs” are still at work today. You can adopt one or chip in to keep them sniffing: