Mines Blast: a round with no collect button
Mines Blast by Mascot Gaming rearranged the order of operations for the whole format. Tiles are not opened one at a time here - they are marked in advance, from 1 to 23 per round, and the result is revealed for all of them at once. There are no intermediate decisions, which means there is no temptation either: you cannot stop, because there is nowhere to stop.
- Studio
- Mascot Gaming
- Stated RTP
- 95%
- Field size
- 5x5
- Released
- February 2025
Four screens from the game
Frames from Mascot Gaming material: mine selector, patterns, ranks and skins.
What marking every tile at once changes
Not a cosmetic rearrangement but a different character of risk.
In ordinary mines the decision recurs: open a tile, look at the multiplier, decide. That is where the entire strategy of the format lives, and it is also where the strategy most often collapses - because after a good tile you want one more.
Mines Blast moves every decision to the start. You mark, say, seven tiles and a mine count, press the stake and see the whole result. Either all seven were clean and the payout is yours, or a mine sat among them and the round is lost. Nothing happens between those two outcomes.
That makes the game feel closer to a lottery ticket than to classic mines. There is one substantial upside: the one-more-tile pull does not exist by construction. There is one downside too - the format's only working habit, the pre-named exit point, disappears with it, because there is nowhere left to exit.
Ranks and skins: a mechanic from outside casinos
The layer Mascot Gaming carried over from video games.
Bets raise your rank, and rank unlocks new board skins and avatars. None of it touches payouts: rank grants no bonuses, no multipliers, no rebates, only appearance. The game shipped in February 2025, and at that point such a layer was still a rarity in mines.
It is worth knowing about for one reason. Progress that grows from bet volume rather than from results is a way to supply a sense of movement where there is none: the round was lost, and the rank bar went up anyway. That is not a deception - the studio describes the mechanic openly - but that is how it works.
The practical conclusion is simple: rank cannot be counted as value. Judge the game by its stated RTP of 95 and by how a round is built, and treat board skins as board skins.
Who this format suits
Anyone who knows they have trouble stopping. The absence of a collect button solves that more decisively than self-discipline ever will: the decision was made before the round, and it cannot be revisited.
It does not suit anyone who finds the process itself interesting. There is nothing to watch here: mark, press, see the result. For process, go to the games that open tiles one at a time - Hot-mines with its ladder above the board, or Minesweeper with its path.
How does Mines Blast differ from ordinary mines
In the order of operations. Classic mines opens tiles one at a time with a collect button after each. Here 1 to 23 tiles are marked in advance, before the round, and the result arrives all at once. There is no mid-round collect button because there is no middle.
What are the preset marking patterns for
So you are not placing twenty tiles by hand every round. A pattern is a saved arrangement applied with one press. It has no effect on the outcome: the layout is fixed before the round and does not care about the order you marked things in.
What do ranks give you
Cosmetics: new board skins and avatars. Rank grows from bet volume rather than from wins and has no bearing on payouts. It is a loyalty layer borrowed from video games, not a part of the maths.
How volatile is Mines Blast
The studio states high volatility, and the structure supports that: a round with no intermediate exits is all or nothing. The stated RTP of 95 is the middle of this set, while the spread of results is sharper than in games with a collect button.