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The puzzle below, when filled out completely, is a valid minesweeper board.

Some of the mines and numbers have already been filled in.

Can you fill in what is missing and use the solved grid to find a hidden phrase?

enter image description here

Hint 1:

The hidden phrase contains 9 characters (7 are letters)

Hint 2:

Each character is represented in the grid by 3 digits.

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The solved grid (solved independently of @Glorfindel - pipped to the initial posting of the completed grid by seconds!) is as follows:

enter image description here

What's crucial here is to:

Make sure to enter the relevant 'minesweeper' number into all the green blanks (i.e. the number of mines in the 8 adjacent squares).

This then gives us:

27 digits on green squares. As we are looking for a 9-character phrase, these naturally group into triplets:

078/105/067/101/032/074/111/066/033

What do we have now? Well, notice that these numbers:

fall nicely into the range in ASCII used for standard letter and punctuation characters. If we translate these triplets into ASCII (noting that 032 is a space and 033 is an exclamation mark), we see the final phrase:

NiCe JoB!

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Here is the solved grid:

enter image description here

but I'm not sure (yet) what to do next ...

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  • 2
    $\begingroup$ Do you know why some squares are green? $\endgroup$ – Zimonze Apr 22 at 15:10
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    $\begingroup$ Replacing the red dashes with the correct number should nudge you towards the hidden phrase. $\endgroup$ – w l Apr 23 at 9:06

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