The Chord Cup and Minesweeper Royale

After the official MSWCH had ended, they continued with the Chord Cup. As mentioned in the previous post, it was new to me.

So here’s what I learned: Chord Cup is a 1vs1 elimination Minesweeper competition where players race to solve a series of Minesweeper boards faster than their opponent. The series of boards are identical for both players, and they are all no-guess boards. Each board has a starting point indicated to the players, so that the competition is fair with neither player needing to make any guesses. (Because depending on where you start a board, you might or might not have to guess.)

I snapped a few photos while they were playing. 

solving the same boards

this was the finals; it's neck and neck!

this is a case where the two players were on different boards, because either one of them was one board (or more) faster, or someone had blasted a board (if we blast a board, we move to the next board)

Here are a couple of videos where you can see the players in action.

Halfway through the Chord Cup, we had a late tea break (merienda in Spanish). I snapped a quick discreet photo of the food they had prepared.

fruit, bread (soft baguette-like slices that are used for canapes), ham, cheese (I think), guacamole, potato chips, and maybe some stuff I don't remember

After the tea break and the finals of the Chord Cup, we had the prize presentation.

our organizer, with prizes on the table

joined by his co-organize, who is actually from Madrid

The next day, we had the Minesweeper Royale.

We played this on minesweeper.online, which seems to be where most people play these days (not on their personal computer). We would play whatever boards we wanted, and the scores (and stats) would be logged. Then we would see our best scores in each category like speed, efficiency, win streak, and density. On the official website for MSWCH 2025, you can see two other categories which are arena and mobile. I can’t remember what arena was, but the other is where you play on a mobile device instead of using a mouse on PC.

I did not take part in the Chord Cup, but I did participate in the Minesweeper Royale. I knew my speed would not be up to par, so I just tried to play for efficiency.

You know what? I believe I was the one who kickstarted the interest in efficiency, because for the longest time I had been trying to minimize the number of clicks I used, and use flags as efficiently as possible (only place flags when I need them for double-clicking). Indirectly, using less clicks also means we can move faster, right? I remember feeling extremely accomplished the first time I managed to finish a board using fewer clicks than its 3bv (the 3bv of a board is the minimum number of left-clicks needed to finish the board). After I shared that, interest in efficiency started and the IOE (index of efficiency) was added to the Minesweeper stats.

Anyway, I was no match for these new players who seemed to have been working on efficiency since they started playing. Damien Moore (our veteran and owner of the Authoritative Mineweeper website) was at the session and was also playing for efficiency, but he fared just a little better than me.

initial ranking at 3rd place (because no one had started for efficiency yet? :P )

Note that the prizes for Minesweeper Royale are cryptocurrency. First three spots in each category win some money!

But of course my ranking had dropped by the time the tournament ended.

12th place, with Damien right above me

A newer player had shared with us the previous day that there were modes on their new websites to allow practising for efficiency. It seems that it is easier to get better efficiency scores on denser boards, so the algorithm would only generate higher density boards when they were practising for efficiency. (Note: In these situations where boards are not generated fully randomly, I think high scores are not valid for true rankings.) Then while playing normally, they would be able to recognize which boards they might play more slowly on to optimize efficiency, and which boards they should speed up on to play for time.

It is worth mentioning that there were three or four website developers at the event…they had great discussions about website design and maintenance, while I mostly listened in. 

The organizers printed a t-shirt for the event, and I bought one for 12€.

They also printed a bunch of stickers. They said they had estimated that each person could have 5 of each sticker. I wasn't going to take so many at the beginning, but then I thought it might be a good souvenir/advertisement back in Malaysia, so I took my allocation (what would they do with the leftovers anyway?) and offered the excess to the people at work.

Props to those who designed these...I like some of them more than others, but they all look pretty good and professional.

The Minesweeper World Championships 2025

I’m writing about this almost a whole year after the event…the championships were held on the 27th and 28th of September last year.

It was the whole reason why I planned a trip to Portugal and Spain, ticking off Portugal from my bucket list, and postponing Japan which was previously the next place I had planned to visit.

Since I was practically retired from Minesweeper by then, just playing a few games every month, there was not much to hope for in terms of results. I was there to play and have fun.

The scene has changed a lot since years back when I was an active player. We used to simply have one event where we would play and have our final scores tabulated to see who scored the fastest times out of a certain number of games. This time, they still had that, which was the “official” Minesweeper World Championships (MSWCH), but they had side events like Chord Cup and Minesweeper Royale, both of which I had never heard of before.

The event was held at 42 Madrid. They had tight security; we registered with our passport and even went through a bag scan before being allowed to enter with an access card. 

someone drew this on a whiteboard outside the computer room

more decorations on the windows inside the room

setting up my mouse

I brought a mousepad, but theirs seemed fine...maybe because I am no longer an active player; it doesn't make much difference. :P 

ready to play!

(See all those additional icons on the screen after setting up? :P )

I took a few photos of the rankings after finishing some games, to see what the highest point was. (I knew my ranking would drop once everyone started completing all the necessary games…) My highest ranking was 17, right after finishing all the intermediates and one expert. 

my high scores of the day

Here are the final results after the session ended:

our organizer and old-timer Thomas Kolar was at 2nd place!

Everyone else before number 15th (Damien) were newer players that I didn't know.

I came in at number 39

there were a total of 47 players

For old times' sake, we actually took a photo with all the old-timers.

the only people I knew there; from left (after me): Damien, Tommy, Eduard, and Stevan

We had all met each other before, except for Stevan whom we were all meeting for the first time. He had been on the scene but never managed to make it to a physical meet.

When we arrived at the event, we were given different-coloured wristbands to indicate whether we allowed others to photograph us, whether we wanted them to ask for permission first, and a few other indicators that I don’t remember. Anyway, because of this, I won’t post general photos of the room, because I don’t know whether the face of someone who doesn’t want to be photographed might be clear enough in them. 

Since this post is getting long, I'll continue about the side events in a separate post.