Three flagging styles, what each is good for, and why Bean Boom's flags explode.
Ask ten experienced minesweeper players whether you should flag every mine and you'll get a genuinely split vote. Flagging isn't a rule question — it's a style question, with real trade-offs in speed, safety, and cognitive load. This guide lays out the three major styles, when each one wins, and how flagging works differently in Bean Boom's Egg Mode, where a correct flag is a weapon.
Stripped of mythology, flags do exactly three things:
What flags do not do: win the game (the win condition is revealing all safe cells), verify themselves (wrong flags look identical to right ones), or reveal any information (flags are a record of your deductions, not a source of new ones).
Mechanics refresher: right-click to flag on desktop, long-press on mobile, or toggle Flag mode above the board in Bean Boom so every tap plants a flag.
Every mine you deduce gets a flag, every satisfied number gets chorded.
Chording throughput. Chords reveal up to seven cells per click — the fastest clearing mechanism in the game, and it requires flags. Safety. Locked cells can't be misclicked. Endgame clarity. The mine counter stays meaningful, which matters for counting yourself out of 50/50 corners.
Click cost. Every flag is an extra click. On a Hard board with 99 mines, full flagging adds ~99 clicks per game — 15–25% more input than needed. Wrong-flag risk. Every flag is an unverified claim; one mistake poisons every deduction that counts it, and a chord on a wrong flag is fatal.
Best for: beginners (the structure builds good habits), players who value win rate over time, and long Hard-board sessions where the mine counter matters.
Flag only what's needed to chord the cells you actually want to clear — typically the mines around dense clusters — and let isolated mines sit unflagged.
The logic: a lone mine in an open area endangers nothing you're about to click. Flagging it is a wasted action. But a mine embedded in a cluster you're actively working needs a flag both as insurance and as a chord component.
Best for: intermediates ready to trade some safety for speed. This is the style most strong players converge on naturally. It demands you keep honest mental notes of unflagged known mines — the cognitive cost is the price of the saved clicks.
The purist style: never flag, never chord, reveal only. Popular enough among record-chasers that "NF" is standard vocabulary.
The case for NF is input efficiency in its purest form — every click either reveals a cell or is wasted. The case against: you lose chording entirely (seven-cell reveals for one click) and you lose the mine counter's value, making endgame arithmetic mostly mental.
NF players also swear it sharpens logic: without flags as external memory, you're forced to hold constraints in your head, which (they claim) speeds pattern recognition. Skeptics reply that chording is worth more than the saved clicks. Both sides produce world-class times, which tells you the gap is smaller than the debate suggests.
Best for: speed obsessives on small boards and anyone who finds flag toggling physically fatiguing.
| Full Flag | Spartan | No-Flag | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clicks per game | Highest | Moderate | Lowest |
| Chording | Full use | Partial | None |
| Misclick protection | Strong | Partial | None |
| Endgame counting | Counter-driven | Mostly counter | Mental math |
| Cognitive load | Low | Medium | High |
| Best for | Win rate | Balanced speed | Pure speed |
Bean Boom's Classic Mode follows everything above exactly. The Egg Mode deliberately inverts the economics: a correctly placed flag detonates.
When you flag a mine that truly is a mine, a Bean Boom blast erupts from it, revealing the safe cells in a radius around it. Chain mechanics stack on top:
The strategic consequences are fun:
Full flagging. The external record trains you to count neighbors correctly, and the safety net keeps games alive long enough to practice mid-game logic. Switch styles once wins feel routine.
On small boards, often yes — fewer clicks, and chording opportunities are fewer anyway. On Hard boards, most top times still use flags plus heavy chording. Try both and let your own hands decide.
Of course — spartan flagging is exactly that: flag when a cluster needs chording, don't when it doesn't. Rigid consistency matters less than matching flags to purpose.
Not punish — you can play Egg Mode NF — but you leave most of the scoring engine unused. Blasts and combos only trigger from correct flags.