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In Pondscape, you’re not saving the planet or designing some grand wildlife reserve. You’re just building a small pond. That’s it. And honestly, that already tells you a lot about the game.
Over fifteen rounds, you build a personal 3×5 grid of cards. Frogs, habitats, water, food. Everything wants something slightly different, and your space is tight from the very beginning. By the end, things either fall nicely into place… or they don’t. And yeah, that can be a bit painful sometimes.
It’s a quiet tableau builder with a nature theme, where most of what you’re doing is thinking about timing. There aren’t many big moments, just a lot of small choices that slowly add up. If that already sounds like your kind of game, you’ll probably want to keep reading.
👥 1-4 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designer: Tomáš Holek
🎨 Artwork: Jiří Kůs
🏢 Publisher: Pink Troubadour (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Each round starts with a small choice. You take one of the three face-up cards from the display and add it to your hand. Some of those cards sit under a movement value of one or two. If you pick one of those, the jumping frog moves that many steps clockwise along the shared row of jumping frog food cards in the center. The empty slot in the display is filled immediately, so you don’t get much time to overthink what might come next.
After that, you place one card from your hand into your pond. You can play it face up or face down as water. Face-down cards give an immediate effect or food symbols, which often helps when your hand doesn’t really line up with your plan. Once a card is placed, it stays there. No shifting things around later, which I must admit makes every early decision feel a bit heavier than it first appears.
Some cards have small effect icons, like drawing cards or moving the frog again. These effects trigger right after placement. They’re not huge, but they often decide whether a turn feels smooth or slightly awkward.
The jumping frog is really where the game gets interesting. It always sits between two adjacent food cards, and when a card effect tells you to move it, you can then tuck up to one card from your hand under each of the two food cards it’s sitting between. Those tucked cards do nothing right away, but at the end of the game they score one point for every matching food symbol in your pond.
So yeah, timing matters. A lot. You start paying attention to where that frog is, not because you have to, but because you don’t want to miss a good moment to tuck.
There are eight frog species in the game, and each scores in its own way. Some want big connected groups, others care about what’s next to them. Ornate horned frogs need at least four different food types somewhere in your pond. Clown tree frogs like to be next to other species. Panamanian golden frogs score through heavy tucking under one food type, while blue poison dart frogs want habitats nearby.
Then there’s the desert rain frog, which, let’s be fair, does its own thing. It never forms clusters and mostly exists for its immediate effects. It only scores if the card itself says so. Kind of a weird one, but it makes sense in play.
Habitat cards also come into play here. There are five types, and variety is what matters. They’re useful even if they’re not central to your plan. Water cards do a lot of quiet work too. They help with food symbols, satisfy some scoring conditions, or just give you a few points when you need them.
After fifteen rounds, everyone stops. Scoring looks at frog clusters, solitary frogs where applicable, water cards, habitat variety, and finally all those tucked cards you’ve been saving for later.
Artwork, Components, and Visual Design
Pondscape is all cards. That’s the whole production. No extra bits, no table presence tricks. If you’re hoping for flashy components, this probably isn’t it.
That said, it does look nice. The artwork by Jiří Kůs has a soft, hand-painted feel, with calm colors and friendly-looking frogs. Nothing really jumps out, but it all fits together. By the end of the game, your pond actually looks like a small, coherent place, which I like more than I expected.
Frogs are easy to tell apart, which helps during scoring, and the habitats and water cards blend in naturally. When cards are placed face down as water, those blue tones connect visually, making your grid feel less random.
The food icons are clear and readable, even once there’s a lot going on. The jumping frog in the center is simple, but it does its job. You keep glancing at it, whether you want to or not. Graphic design stays functional throughout. Nothing gets in the way, which is probably the best compliment here.
Our Experience
Most of the tension in Pondscape comes from timing, not from what other players are doing. Turns are quick, rules are easy to explain, and the game keeps moving. It works well as a shorter game or as something calmer between heavier titles.
At the same time, it’s not mindless. Space is limited, and cards don’t always appear when you want them. You often have to choose between setting something up for later or just taking points now. Sometimes that feels clever. Sometimes it just feels annoying.
Interaction is minimal. Everyone builds their own pond, and the shared draft and frog position are pretty much it. For some groups, that’s perfect. For others, it might feel a bit like parallel play. I guess it depends on what you’re looking for that evening.
What surprised me is how much attention the jumping frog gets over time. Early on, it feels like a rule you follow. Later, it becomes something you actively plan around. That shift added more tension than I expected going in.
Our Thoughts
Pondscape doesn’t try to reinvent tableau building. Draft a card, place it, score patterns. You’ve seen this before. Games like Cascadia and Castle Combo sit in a similar space, and the comparison is unavoidable.
What makes Pondscape work for me is how all the bits connect. The frog, tucking, food symbols, and limited grid all push in the same direction. The jumping frog, in particular, does a lot of work. It links tempo, hand management, and endgame scoring in a way that feels natural once you’re a few rounds in.
Still, it won’t be for everyone. The game is quite tight, and mistakes stick with you. Some frog strategies are much harder to pursue if the cards show up late. Water and habitat cards help soften that, but they don’t fully fix it. A bad card order can still hurt, and you need to be okay with that.
Depth-wise, it sits comfortably in the middle. There’s enough room for skill and growth, especially in recognizing when to plan tucking turns or when to stop setting up and just score. But it stays contained. The fixed grid keeps things from spiralling, for better and for worse.
Pondscape is a fairly calm experience, and it knows exactly what it wants to be. Most of the time you’re just making small choices and hoping they line up later. Nothing really explodes, and that’s clearly intentional. If you enjoy that kind of quiet planning and slow payoff, this will probably work for you.
📝 We received a copy of Pondscape from Pink Troubadour.
