Minesweeper thermodynamics

I hacked up a version of minesweeper that was “forgiving:” if there was no selection that was provably safe, it gave you a safe move. If you picked any square that was not provably a bomb, it would not be a bomb. Typically, as long as you don’t select a number of bombs equal to the number of squares , your first move is safe. I just extended that for the whole game. If you select N-1 bombs, you always win on the first move..

Ha! This is NP-Complete, no? In practice, it probably doesn't matter but my bet is that there are some configurations that will take exponential time to see if the player should be "forgiven".