Quagmire
- Board's Eye View
- Jun 27
- 2 min read
With its frog and lilypad theme you might be forgiven for thinking Perplext's Quagmire is a cute children's game. Don't be fooled, however. Designer Chris Handy has come up with a surprisingly tactical strategy game; essentially an abstract strategy game wearing its frog theme as a wafter-thin veneer.
The game is played on a 4 x 4 grid of lilypads. You lay these out on the board but the different decorations on the lilypads are mostly just decorative so you aren't using the lilypads to create a modular board; the board could just as readily have had the lilypads printed on it. The four lilypads in the centre of the grid have tokens on them representing flies.
The frogs in the game take the form of tiles that bear a layout showing that frog's individual movement route. Players each start off with three or four frogs and, on your turn, you can play a frog from your hand to the edge of the board or you can advance a frog to its next position. If advancing your frog gets it to its destination position as shown on its tile, you remove the frog tile and score it. It scores points equal to the number of players (2-4). Alternatively, however, you can discard a frog tile from your hand in order to score a point for every frog in one of the four indicated positions on that tile. For this purpose, those frogs can belong to any player.
If, when you advance a frog, you land on a fly token, you position the fly to an adjacent empty lilypad but, crucially, you get to draw another frog tile. That's important because without replenishing your frogs you can find yourself unable to perform an action, which would earn you a 3 point penalty. Finally, if a frog lands on an opponent's frog, you remove your opponent's frog and it scores you 1 point.
What starts off as a simple move and score game quickly becomes a tight chess-like tactical scuffle, both for nabbing a fly bonus and for 'capturing' an opponent. Players can see the routes of all the tiles in play, so you can see when a move puts your frog at risk of being leapt on by an opponent's frog... Particularly in a two-player game, players soon find themselves planning at least two moves ahead. You don't know, however, what pattern of positions is shown on frog tiles still in an opponent's hand, so there's always a chance that your move will provide your opponent with a potentially high scoring opportunity: if all four positions on that tile are filled, it can earn them 4 points...
As you increase the player count so the game becomes somewhat more chaotic. It's harder to keep track of the routes of all the frogs that are in play. Getting a frog to its destination lilypad is worth more but there's also a greatly increased chance of fortuitous discard scoring. With three or four players, Quagmire may therefore be less tactical but it's nonetheless a lot of fun.
