Wouter & Ymke 
A pond full of frogs probably doesn’t sound like the setting for a game that makes you stop and think. That was certainly our first impression. Quagmire looks cheerful, colourful and very approachable, with frogs following their own paths across the pond. It almost gives the impression that you’ll spend half an hour moving frogs around and having a relaxed time. Well… not quite.
After our first game, we realised there was much more going on than we expected. Every frog follows its own route across the pond, but moving your own frogs is only part of the puzzle. Before long, we were paying just as much attention to everyone else’s frogs as our own, trying to work out how the board might change over the next few turns. It took us a game or two before everything clicked, but once it did, we found ourselves looking at the same pond in a completely different way.
👥 2-4 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 20-45 minutes
📝 Designer: Chris Handy
🎨 Artwork: Magdalena Markowska
🏢 Publisher: Perplext (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Each turn, you perform just one action. You can play a frog to your shore, move a frog from your shore onto the board, advance one that’s already on the pond, complete the route of a frog that has reached its destination, or discard a frog from your hand to score its formation. The list of actions is short, so after a couple of turns we rarely looked back at the reference cards.
As frogs move around the pond, they’ll occasionally land on flies or on another player’s frog. Landing on a fly lets you draw another frog into your hand, giving you more options later on. Landing on an opponent’s frog removes it from the board and immediately scores a point.
Formation scoring works quite differently. Every frog shows four specific lily pads. Instead of putting that frog into play, you can discard it from your hand and score one point for each of those spaces that is occupied. The frogs on those spaces can belong to anyone, which means players are constantly creating scoring opportunities for each other, often without realising it.
Quite early on you’ll notice that every frog can be used in more than one way. You can put it onto the board and start moving it straight away, or keep it in your hand because its formation might become valuable later. Since you only get one action each turn, you can’t do everything at once, so deciding what to leave until later becomes just as important as deciding what to do now.
Once the last frogs have been drawn, the game enters its final stage. Play continues until someone can no longer perform an action, after which everyone totals the points they’ve earned from completed routes, captured frogs, formations and flies collected during the endgame. The player with the highest score wins.
Artwork & Components
The first thing that caught our attention was the pond itself. Rather than printing the lily pads directly onto the board, Quagmire uses separate cardboard lily pad tiles placed on top of it. It’s a simple idea, but it gives the table a bit more depth and makes the finished board look far more interesting once frogs start spreading across it.
The frog tiles do most of the heavy lifting visually. They’re large enough to fit the artwork, movement route and formation pattern without feeling crowded, and every frog has its own expression and personality. That also makes it surprisingly easy to spot the frog you’re looking for, even once the board starts getting busy.
Everything else is nicely put together too. The fly tokens stand out well against the green lily pads, the reference cards are genuinely useful during your first game, and the cardboard has a satisfying thickness. Nothing in the box feels over-produced, but once the pond fills up with frogs it naturally draws people over to see what you’re playing.
Our Experience
Our first game was probably our weakest one, and honestly that was mostly our own fault. We treated Quagmire like a race, concentrating almost entirely on moving frogs along their routes and collecting what looked like easy points. Formation scoring felt like a nice little bonus rather than something to actively work towards. Looking back, we were really only playing half the game.
The biggest change came during our second and third plays. We slowly stopped asking ourselves which frog we wanted to move and started wondering which frog everyone else was most likely to move next. One thing that surprised us was that every frog follows a fixed route, yet the game never became predictable. You always know where a frog can go, but not which frog another player has decided is most important that turn. By our third game we were often talking more about someone else’s frogs than our own, trying to work out which lily pads were about to become valuable and which ones we’d be better off avoiding.
Formation scoring changed completely once we started paying more attention to the whole board. Since every frog can help someone else score, opponents regularly created opportunities without meaning to. More than once, one of us proudly finished a move only for somebody else to quietly say, “Thanks,” before discarding a frog for four points. Those moments usually got a laugh, although perhaps not from the player who had just helped. We also became much more protective of the frogs in our hand. Every frog represented several possibilities, and once you committed it to the board, the other options disappeared.
Player count changed the feel of the game quite a bit. With two players, we could usually make a reasonable guess about what the other person was planning. With three or four players, that became much harder because the pond looked completely different by the time it came back to us. Instead of trying to predict everything, we found ourselves reacting to the board as it developed.
Even after several games, we were still noticing little interactions we’d missed before. Not because new rules appeared, but because we’d started looking at familiar situations differently. I mean, any game that has you discussing frog traffic for ten minutes afterwards has probably done something right.
Our Thoughts
For us, Quagmire is at its best when everyone around the table is paying attention to the same board. It isn’t the sort of game where you quietly build your own little strategy in a corner. Other players keep changing the picture, sometimes helping you, sometimes getting in your way, and often doing both at once. We enjoyed that because it meant our plans rarely survived unchanged for very long.
I also don’t think Quagmire is a game you’ll completely understand after a single play. The rules themselves are straightforward, but recognising when to keep a frog in your hand, when to finish a route and when to change your plans only really came through experience. If someone at the table isn’t completely convinced after one game, I’d honestly suggest giving it another before deciding whether it’s for them.
Our biggest criticism is that some groups could slow the game down more than they realise. We had a couple of turns where someone spent several minutes comparing two frogs in their hand because both looked like good options. In the end, neither choice turned out to be hugely better than the other. If your group enjoys thinking every move through, that’s probably fine. If not, it’s worth keeping the game moving and trusting your instincts now and then.
One thing I did enjoy was that Quagmire never relied on surprises to stay interesting. Everything you need to know is sitting there on the table. The challenge comes from reading the board a little better than everyone else, rather than hoping to draw the right card or trigger a powerful ability. That felt refreshing.
We expected something fairly light, but by the end of our third game we were still talking about moves we’d made and wondering what we could have done differently. It won’t be the right fit for every group, especially if you’re looking for a game that reveals everything it has to offer in a single play. For us, though, it was one of those games that became more enjoyable the more familiar we became with it, and we’re quite happy to keep this little pond on the shelf for future game nights.
📝 We received a review copy of Quagmire from Perplext.
