The Battlegrounds Glossary: Every Term You'll Hear, Explained
Meta note: card-specific slang changes with patches; this glossary covers the evergreen vocabulary you'll hear in any season.
Battlegrounds has its own language, and guides assume you already speak it. If you've ever nodded along to "I had no tempo so I greeded the tier-up and high-rolled a triple," this glossary is for you. Here are the terms that actually come up, grouped by topic.
Economy and shop
- Tempo — Board strength right now. Playing for tempo means winning combats this turn, often at the cost of long-term scaling.
- Scaling — Power that grows over time (permanent stat gains, engines). Scaling wins late; tempo wins early.
- Economy — How you manage gold: leveling, rolling, and freezing to maximize value over the game.
- Roll / Refresh — Spending 1 gold to get a new shop of minions.
- Freeze — Locking the current shop so it's there next turn. Used to "save" good minions you can't afford yet.
- Tier-up / Level — Upgrading your Tavern tier to access stronger minions. The cost drops by 1 each turn you don't level.
- Greed — Prioritizing economy or scaling over board strength, betting you can survive the weakness.
Minions and boards
- Body — A minion, especially one valued for its raw stats rather than effect.
- Stats / Stat-stick — Raw attack/health. A "stat-stick" is a big vanilla minion with no important text.
- Triple — Three copies of the same minion combine into a golden version plus a discovery from a higher tier. A key power and tempo spike.
- Tokens — Small minions generated by other cards (common in Beast and swarm builds).
- Carry — The minion your buffs funnel into to do the heavy lifting in combat.
- Buff — A permanent or temporary stat increase applied to a minion.
Combat
- Trade — When minions attack and kill each other. "Good trades" preserve your board while removing theirs.
- Cleave — Damage that hits the target plus adjacent minions; positioning matters a lot against it.
- Divine Shield — Blocks the first instance of damage. Pairs powerfully with buffs and cleave.
- Poison / Venomous — Destroys any minion it damages, regardless of stats — the great equalizer against big bodies.
- Reborn — The minion returns once at 1 health when it dies (central to Undead synergy).
- Positioning — The left-to-right order of your minions, which controls attack order and who absorbs what.
Outcomes and luck
- High-roll — A lucky run of great offers, triples, or hero/trinket combos.
- Low-roll — The opposite: bad offers and no synergy.
- Snowball — When small early advantages compound into a runaway lead.
- Brick — A shop or roll that gives you nothing useful.
- Pivot — Switching your intended comp mid-game because something better opened up.
Heroes and extras
- Hero Power — Your hero's unique ability; it shapes your ideal economy and comp.
- Trinket — A run-long bonus you pick during the game (when the mode includes them) that can steer your build.
- Anomaly — A lobby-wide rule modifier (when active) that changes the math for everyone.
- APM (Actions Per Minute) — How many shop actions you squeeze into a turn; high APM means more efficient gold use.
Takeaway
You don't need the slang to play well, but knowing it makes every guide, tier list, and stream instantly more useful. Bookmark this, and the next time someone says they "froze for the triple and pivoted off the open tribe," you'll know exactly what happened.