In this game, you drive a truck around to gather and defuse time bombs before they explode - all the while avoiding mines and bomb craters. You find yourself in the center of a small minefield with several bombs, represented by circles, and a generous number of mines, shown as X's. Your truck is a diamond. To defuse the bombs, just run over them with the truck. When the bombs first appear, they are innocent-looking little circles. After a short time - the rate varies from bomb to bomb - they turn reverse-field. This means watch it. Soon they begin to blink and you have only a few blinks to defuse them before they explode. Any mines (or heroic defusing teams) caught in the explosion will be instantly lost. Bombs caught in the explosion will explode, whether they were ready to or not. Your truck can move in only four directions. It can "wrap around" all four edges of the screen. Don't run it into the mines or the craters (*) left by the bombs or your truck will be destroyed. Once you begin moving, your truck cannot stop until it is blown up or until the current minefield is cleared of bombs.

There are four difficulties (with one to four lives) and the game remembers your highscore. Level 0 has four trucks, Level 1 has three, Level 2 has two and Level 3 has one truck. Scoring is 10 points for a normal bombs, 20 for a reverse-field bomb, 30 for a blinking bomb minus 10 for each exploded bomb.

The original article in Compute! included versions for the Commodore PET, VIC 20, C64 and Apple II. The C64 version was later published in "Compute!'s First Book of Commodore 64 Games" and in "Giochi fantastici con il C64". The C64 and VIC 20 versions were also translated into Italian in the August 1984 issue of Papersoft.

The following attributes can be used to map the evolution of Minesweeper. Blue cells are confirmed attributes for official versions of Minefield. Yellow cells are unknown.