The phone version is rather pleasant; no commercials.
There’s a little toggle to switch between testing a square and tagging a mine, but I rarely use that because all you have to do is a long touch to tag a mine; it’s just faster than toggling back and forth. (Maybe it could be even faster with force touch, but that doesn’t work right now.)
You can scale the settings up to quite a large minefield and pinch to zoom in and out. But I’m hungry for even a larger field now.
All it needs to go over the top is some sort of leaderboard or social sharing.
The watch lacks these advantages, I’m afraid. It plays well enough, but you only get a tiny field. No zooming and scrolling, even though it would work quite well with the Digital Crown. You have to manually toggle between tagging mines and testing squares; no long touch or force touch.
All that said, in a field of wretched free apps, it would be well worth a dollar to buy.
I was tempted to post, “Do not recommend. Unrealistic portrayal of the process of clearing a mine field.” But that seemed a touch snarky.