The Simon Tatham version [1] is great because the puzzle generator eliminates situations that requires random guesses.
1) https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/ (scroll down to "Mines")
1) https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/ (scroll down to "Mines")
So the version described in the article, where it generates purely random setups and you can ask for help if it's truly impossible to make progress without guessing, will actually give more interesting puzzles, sometimes.
A more ideal version would even take into account probabilities, so that to get help you'd have to point it at one of the squares with the lowest probability of having a mine in it. (Or, as another commenter points out, a square with the highest probability of useful progress.)
The Android version [0] of Simon Tathams games is most likely the best puzzle compilation you can get for your phone!
It is small, free, fully offline and does not contain any ads. I literally spend hundreds of hours playing this game over the last few years.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=name.boyle.chr...
He is also the person behind PuTTY.
I thought I recognised that name from somewhere. I once had to hack the PuTTY sources for an internal project and it was quite an enjoyable experience due to how cleanly written the code was. I was always a fan of PuTTY but I'd gained a new appreciation for it that day.
And using trivial deductions (based on the numbers in the column, row, and square there is only one possibility) is not sufficient to be better than me (and I don't consider myself to be good).
They are usually sitting right in the middle between entirely abstract games like backgammon and "simulation" games like Risk or Monopoly. There is usually some theme, but gameplay considerations (mostly revolving around keeping the game interesting for those not on an obvious path to victory and balancing luck vs skill, hence the mention in this thread) are far more important in the design than adhering to that theme. Sometimes it even seems as if the theme was not serving as inspiration for the rules but it's only a skin pasted over the bare rules after the gameplay had been tweaked to perfection.
(There are many exceptions that do use die/dice, but for those that have not played board games invented after Monopoly, the idea of a board game that does not have die-introduced randomness may be quite foreign.)
Many years ago I used to be quite addicted. The unconscious pattern matching went far enough to detect unknowable situations and do even the switch back and forth between guessing and solving without spending a conscious thought. The goal was not to solve as many boards as possible with a timeframe, but to get the best time so there was a kind of triage going on between trying to solve possible solvable large scale situations and failing fast. The strategic level was finding the right cutoff.