Who da man? I da man, that’s who!

I brought the advanced level of “Minesweeper” to its knees just now. A total beatdown.

And it took me only 160 attempts.

Take that, you … mines! Consider yourself completely and utterly swept. Break out the brooms!

I didn’t quite do a victory dance when I finally won the advanced level version of this pernicious, mind-and-wrist-numbing compter game. I was too relieved to be happy.

Man, what a hassle. Absolutely not worth it. But I was going to keep playing that game till I beat it once. ONCE. That’s all. Once.

It’s tougher than I thought. On several levels.

1. You’ve gotta find 99 mines on a 16×30 grid. If you click on even one, you’re done.

2. You have to do some hard thinking. Twenty or 30 times per game you reach a point where there is no obvious move. Then you have to start doing the “if this isn’t that, then this can’t be that and that MUST be that” kind of stuff. It’s draining.

3. You can’t get sloppy. Probably 50 of the 160 games … as I’m clicking along, I meant to press the right-click on the laptop (marking a mine location) and accidentally hit the “reveal” button (the left click or, as I used, the touch pad). Which exploded the mine and meant I’d lost. Again. It’s rough. I mean, you’re clicking 480 times, and if you lose your concentration for a second, you lose.

4. It’s nerve-racking. Do it long enough, get close enough, and you may as well be on deadline. Your nervous system gets involved, even though it shouldn’t. You feel adrenaline leaking into your blood system. You feel your pulse rate pick up. You get jumpy. Yeah, all that good stuff, meant for the “fight or flight” aspect of the human condition … wasted on Minesweeper. Ack!

Around game 100 I had it down to two spots. One was a mine. One was not. The clues were inconclusive. I had to guess, a 50-50 proposition. I stared at it for minutes. Finally, I decided one of the two spots would be “less fair” to the gamer, and decided the bomb was perhaps incrementally more likely to be in the other spot.

Then, before think-think-thinking about it one more time … I clicked … on the wrong spot. The one I had decided was likely to be the bomb. And it was.

I may have uttered an “oath,” as we used to say.

So, this morning, I spent more than three hours on this. OK, maybe four. I got inside 10 mines 3-4 times . And at the end of the game I finally won I was SO paranoid about a misstep that it probably took me 10 minutes to go the last 20 squares.

Game took me 24 minutes. Yeah, I could have jogged two miles in that time, washed my car, read a couple of chapters of a book.

But I had to beat Minesweeper, see? I had to. At least once.

And now I’m going to try really, really hard to avoid playing it … oh, forever.