Minesweeper Terminology
Operation Terms
Flag-and-chord: flagging a mine and then chording. These two operations are often performed as one continuous action.
1.5 click: a technique for increasing the speed of flag-and-chord operations.
Play Styles
FL: flagging play. It is also sometimes called "flying flags" in Chinese communities. This style uses both left clicks and flag-and-chord operations.
NF (No Flag): no-flag play. This style only uses left clicks and does not use right clicks or chords to solve the board.
Pseudo-FL: a style mainly based on NF thinking, with occasional flags to improve efficiency. This style often appears when a player is transitioning from NF to FL.
Full flagging: flagging almost all mines.
Other Terms
pb (Personal best): a player's best time for a board of a specific BV value in each difficulty level.
Hopsing: setting both a personal Time record and a 3BV/s record at the same time.
UPK (Unfair Prior Knowledge): a game mode where the same board is restarted. Since it uses unfair prior knowledge, it is considered a cheating mode.
Board cycle: a bug in Windows XP Minesweeper caused by flaws in the pseudo-random number generator, where the same board, or translated and rotated versions of it, can appear repeatedly.
Dreamboard: a very good board, usually with low 3BV and few guesses. It can also refer specifically to a famous intermediate board affected by a board cycle; some players discovered its pattern and achieved astonishing results on it using UPK.
Elmar's Syndrome: repeatedly achieving the same time, accurate to the second, and failing to improve it for a long time.
MB (Miss Block): a situation where the whole board is essentially solved but one cell is missed because the player overlooked it.
LC (Lose on the last click): losing by hitting a mine on the final click.
Opening breaking: a solving approach that tries to predict possible opening locations through guessing and open them early, reducing the number of clicks needed around the edge of openings.
Wall crossing: a solving approach that tries to click areas behind a row of mines to reduce solving difficulty and break a deadlock.
Deferred deduction: a solving approach where the order of deduction and the order of execution differ. More specifically: after using the smallest local pattern that can determine mines, the player temporarily does not execute those operations, but uses the result to continue further deduction. During execution, the player handles later deductions first and earlier deductions afterward, optimizing mouse movement and improving flow.
Full flagging: a play style with many flags. In expert, using more than 80 flags is usually enough to be called full flagging.
Corpse: a saved replay where the game ended by hitting a mine halfway through.
Debt: a gap in a player's top expert Time results when times are counted by integer seconds. For example, if a player's expert times are 41.35 (42), 44.21 (45), 44.78 (45), 45.39 (46), and 46.28 (47), the player can be said to owe 43 and 44.
Debt repayment: if the same player later gets 42.77 (43), they can be said to have repaid the 43-second debt.