What Is 3BV and What Counts as a Good Minesweeper Time
3BV measures how many bare minimum clicks a board needs to be solved. Learn what it means, typical ranges per board size, and how to compare your times honestly.
Quick answer
Two players clear the same Expert board in 180 seconds and 90 seconds. The first is a careful reader, the second is a speed addict. Neither number tells the full story unless you know how many moves the board actually demanded, and that is what 3BV exists to measure.
Two players clear the same Expert board in 180 seconds and 90 seconds. The first is a careful reader, the second is a speed addict. Neither number tells the full story unless you know how many moves the board actually demanded, and that is what 3BV exists to measure.
3BV, in one sentence
3BV (the name comes from the expert-run world that popularized it, and it stands for "Bechtel's Board Benchmark Value") counts the minimum number of clicks required to solve a board, assuming a perfect player: each chord toward unrevealed cells counts once, the opening flood counts once, and solved ground costs nothing.
A board with a 3BV of 180 genuinely requires 180 click-equivalents by the fastest legal route. A board with 3BV 120 can never be cleared in fewer than 120 even by a machine with perfect reads.
Why it slices times fairly
Raw time punishes a player for the luck of the board shape. A sprawling Expert board with lots of open ground has a low 3BV and clears fast; a fortress board with a high 3BV is slow no matter who plays it.
Divide a clear time by the board's 3BV and you get actions per second: a genuinely useful skill number. The 3BV metric is computed and shown alongside each board in Easy Minesweeper, so you can compare a 90-second board that demanded 300 moves to a 90-second board that demanded 150, and know which was the better run.
What good times look like
Typical ranges for a comfortable, accurate player: Beginner boards land around 4 to 9 in 3BV and clear in 10 to 40 seconds. Intermediate runs 40 to 80 and clears in 60 to 180 seconds. Expert boards run 150 to 220 and take most players 3 to 8 minutes while juggling deadlines.
Speed players reach an actions-per-second ratio noticeably above one; chasing that number instead of chasing raw hours is how dedicated players double their speed without becoming sloppy.
Modes that measure this for you
Daily boards are generated as fixed daily puzzles with the same layout for every player, so the 3BV is identical for everyone on a given date, and the daily leaderboard is a fair comparison of reading speed rather than board luck. Rush mode adds a hard stopwatch on top, which forces the same trade a real speedrun makes: read fast, or lose the clock.
Zen mode deliberately removes time as a variable, which makes it the counterweight: there, "good" means a calm, perfect read, not a fast one.
The honest scoring trick
Records in competitive modes ignore your fastest lucky run and keep your best consistent result. A single 3BV-boosted board is a coin flip in disguise; a record you hold across a week of daily boards is a skill you actually own.
Want to know what your quietest possible score looks like? Read the speed techniques guide and then open an Expert board and count your actions per second for one run. Numbers from your own field teach faster than any benchmark.
Take the next move
This board is real, and it is waiting at /play.