Intermediate Minesweeper Leaderboard

What Counts as a Good Intermediate Time

Intermediate benchmarks are wider apart than Beginner ones because there is room for technique to compound. Sub-60 seconds is a solid result and the usual sign that chording has become automatic rather than something you remember to do. Sub-40 seconds is competitive; at that pace you are no longer solving one clue at a time but reading several linked numbers in a single glance. Sub-10 seconds is elite territory that very few players reach on any board draw.

For scale, the fastest Intermediate solve on the externally verified record lists sits at about 7.05 seconds. That record belongs to the global verification authorities outside this site and is not a time you will find in the table above.

Something worth knowing before you compare: Intermediate rewards consistency more than the other difficulties. A player who posts 45 seconds every game is usually further along than one whose average is a minute with a single lucky 30.

Reading 3BV and 3BV/s on the 16x16 Board

Intermediate boards typically carry something in the region of 40 to 70 3BV. That is the minimum click count needed to clear them, and the difference between the two ends of the range is close to a factor of two - enough that time alone tells you very little about who played better.

3BV/s fixes that. It normalises the result by the work the board actually contained, which is why competitive players quote it before they quote seconds. On Intermediate, 2.0 3BV/s is a decent working rate, 3.0 is high, and 4.0 is very high. If your times are stuck but your 3BV/s is still rising, you are improving - the boards have simply been generous or stingy in ways the clock cannot separate.

How to Climb the Intermediate Leaderboard

The players at the top of this table are not clicking faster than you by much; they are clicking fewer times. At 15.6 percent density a satisfied number sits next to several unopened cells, so every chord you take replaces three or four separate reveals. Skipping chords is the single most common reason an Intermediate run stalls around the minute mark.

Flag discipline is the other half. A flag has no ranked value in itself - it only matters when it completes a number you are about to chord, and any flag that does not do that is wasted travel that drags your efficiency down. The habit to build is to place a flag and take the chord it unlocks as one motion, without moving the cursor away in between, then let that chord's new numbers feed the next pair.

Play a Intermediate board · What is the real world record?
Other boards: Beginner leaderboard · Expert leaderboard · No-Guessing rankings · What is the real world record?

• Rankings are sorted by best completion time for each difficulty and mode combination. Only your single best solve counts.
• 3BV/s (3-Board Value per second) measures how many logical cell-groups you cleared per second - it is the standard efficiency metric in competitive minesweeper.
• Efficiency is the percentage of your clicks that were necessary - higher efficiency means less wasted clicks on flagging or chord-clearing.
• The Standard leaderboard allows all legal play styles. No-Guessing is a separate category for boards that were fully solvable without guessing.
• Rankings reset each season - the leaderboard shows this season's top times only. Past season results are archived.

Want to climb faster? Study the Minesweeper patterns guide and the efficiency & 3BV/s guide, then put it into practice on the Expert Minesweeper board.

• High efficiency matters more than raw speed at the top. The fastest players typically have 90 %+ efficiency - every click counts.
• Check both Standard and No-Guessing tabs for your rank. Many players rank significantly better in one mode - knowing your comparative strength helps decide where to compete for season rewards.
• Submit a time before the season ends. Season rewards go to the top-ranked players at the cutoff - a single ranked solve secures your season placement even if it is not a personal best.