Sweep the Strait: Minesweeper, but in the Straitt of Hormuz (plus some tests with RawGit alternatives)
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/31
Forgot to schedule this one when I saw it two weeks ago: [Wayback/Archive] Sweep the Strait.
Apart from demonstrating that Trump never had a plan, does not and will not have a plan, it is cool to see Minesweeper developed in JavaScript, HTML and CSS mapped with some geodata onto a real map of the Strait of Hormuz.
Cool idea!
It has a function Windows 3.x UI with functional menu (Game -> New Game; Help -> How to Play)
At first, I thought the original developer is this:
- [Wayback/Archive] Minesweeper but it’s the Strait of Hormuz. Source: https://sweepthestrait.com
- [Wayback/Archive] Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) • Threads, Say more
German #geographer and #demographer in #Melbourne. I curate #maps and #data that explain how the #world works. Obviously all opinions are my own…
However, in fact the developer is:
- [Wayback/Archive] Sergey Alexashenko (@SAlexashenko): “Minesweeper but it’s the Strait of Hormuz. https://sweepthestrait.com/” | nitter
- [Wayback/Archive] Sergey Alexashenko (@SAlexashenko) | nitter
Making things with AI
Previously co-founded Rostra, worked at Substack, wrote a book on dendritic computation.
San Francisco, CA
sergey.page/
Joined November 2013
Followed by a version with a map background
In the mean time another developer created a version with larger UI elements and an SVG map of the area at [Wayback/Archive] Trump | We’re Going To Win So Much.
That site is open source with a repository at .
It is a nice example that shows things like SEO to get amplicatian on for instance social media, but also has a modal frame showing the winning or losing state with an embedded YouTube short.
All in all it is less like the classic minesweeper (which few know started as an OS/2 version), but more polished. Choices, choices (:
I found the site via [Wayback/Archive] Hormuz Minesweeper – Are you tired of winning? | Hacker News
The gist / RawGit alternatives
Since the first Street of Hormuz Minesweeper did not seem to be available in a repository, I put the code in a gist just in case the page disappears.
The original source code is also archived, as next to the starting URL there are these as well:
- [Wayback/Archive] https://sweepthestrait.com/app.js
- [Wayback/Archive] https://sweepthestrait.com/styles.css
Note the Wayback Machine inserts extra Wombat JavaScript code which can introduce issues (like with [Wayback/Archive] Math.random() – JavaScript | MDN, see for instance [Wayback/Archive] Scripts running in The Wayback Machine : webdev), that’s why I put the whole thing into a gist.
Note that since RawGit got shut down 7 years ago this year, and my still preferred alternative is raw.githack.com as I already mentioned in my early 2019 blog post RawGit is going away: redirect your content before October 2019 (it does disappear after that). In the meantime, more RawGit alternatives have become available so here is a summary:
I based the table above on my own experiences in the past and the links from [Wayback/Archive] git – View rendered output of a gist? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] flossfan and [Wayback/Archive] rsp).
Note:
Despite RawGit having been sunset in 2019, the repository got maintained until 2022 and became read-only in 2024. Thanks [Wayback/Archive] rgrove (Ryan Grove) · GitHub for such a long time maintaining [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – rgrove/rawgit: Served files from raw.githubusercontent.com, but with the correct content types. No longer actively developed. · GitHub.
The geodata
The app source mentions the geodata source to be from Natural Earth, see this fragment:
// Generated from Natural Earth 10m admin-0 country polygons (IRN/OMN/ARE) // over bbox [55.1, 24.0, 58.8, 27.15] with 5x5 supersampling per cell.
Likely sources:
- [Wayback/Archive] Natural Earth » Blog Archive » Admin 0 – Boundary Lines – Free vector and raster map data at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales
- [Wayback/Archive] Natural Earth » Blog Archive » Admin 0 – Countries – Free vector and raster map data at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales
- [Wayback/Archive] natural-earth-vector/10m_cultural at master · nvkelso/natural-earth-vector · GitHub
- [Wayback/Archive] natural-earth-vector/10m_physical at master · nvkelso/natural-earth-vector · GitHub
Query: [Wayback/Archive] Natural Earth 10m admin-0 country polygons at DuckDuckGo
Related blog post: GitHub – slikts/js-equality-game: The Worst Minesweeper 💣 Ever
--jeroen






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