Pondscape

• Designer: Tomas Holek
• Publisher: Capstone Games / Pink Troubador
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3MDErXy
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Pondscape is a strategic card game for 2-4 players, lasting around 30 minutes. In this game, players create their own vibrant pond by carefully placing cards featuring various frog species and pond environments while collecting different insect types. The core mechanisms involve grid building and card management, with pond construction as a spatial puzzle. In each round, players choose cards from a shared display and add one card to their pond, aiming to fulfill specific conditions set by different frog species to earn points, with larger groups of the same frog type yielding even greater rewards. A unique shared mechanism revolves around the “jumper frog”, a central figure that hunts insects and other food. All players influence the jumper frog’s actions and compete to gather insects that can provide bonus points during the final scoring. Careful planning and resourceful play will lead to the most balanced and flourishing pond!

Pondscape is played over 15 rounds, with each player adding a card to their grid.  To setup, the jumping frog food cards are laid out in the center of the table with the frog above the leftmost two.  The pond deck is shuffled and a 3 card market is made with the 0,1,2 movement cards above those.    Each player gets their own personal set of food cards which is arranged at the bottom of their play area.  A starting hand of 3 pond cards is dealt to each player.

On a turn, the active player takes one frog or habitat card from the display into their hand.  The movement card above that card determines how far the jumping frog moves across its row (cycling from the right end back to the left). 

The player then places any one card from their hand to any space in their pond, either face up or face down.  Habitat cards have scoring effects, and you are rewarded for having a higher variety of these.  The frog cards may have a food symbol on them as well as a scoring ability at the bottom.  The reverse side of the frog cards is a water side, which may have food symbols and other effects on them.

If the placed card has an effect, it is resolved at this time.  Some cards trigger movement of the Jumping Frog. After movement, you can then tuck cards from your hand under either of your 2 food cards which the Jumping frog is currently above.  At the end of the game, each of these tucked cards will score a point for each matching food symbol in your pond.  Other effects can cause you to draw cards into your hand or allow special tucking of cards.

Then the next player takes their turn. And this continues until all players have completed their area of 15 cards, always five wide and three high.  The game then moves into scoring:

• Frog Clusters – score for each contiguous group of the different frog species – however each cluster must meet a specific scoring criteria in order to score points
• Score for solitary frogs – desert rain frogs score on their own, so you score each individually
• Score points shown on water cards
• Score for a variety of habitat cards (see scoring card)
• Score for your food type multipliers – each tucked card is worth 1 VP per associated icon in your pond

The player with the most points wins.  Ties broken in favor of the player with the most cards left over.

My thoughts on the game

Pondscape is a lighter game from the same company that has produced Galileo Galilei and Forestry in recent years…. The designer, Tomas Holek, has also shown great versatility in the range of his designs.  I was quite interested to see how this new collaboration between Holek and Pink Troubadour would turn out.

The game looks as if it is a light grid builder – you play one card per turn over 15 turns to build a 3×5 grid and then score everything at the end.  However, things are not as easy as they seem.  There is quite a lot to think about in the game, and the unique ways that each individual frog type scores will shape your strategy.

I personally like to try to draft or play cards early that grant more cards.  My favorite early play is a water that provides 3 cards.  Sure, that might be a dead card for scoring, but getting a large hand early on helps you figure out what frogs you should try to collect.  As the scoring for each group increases based on size, you’ll get the highest score if you have blobs of 5+ frogs of the same type. Once you’ve picked your one or two candidate frog types, then it’s a matter of getting your board set up so that you can score your group.

One corollary of this is that you’ll find that you may not be playing that many different types of frogs – as you’re definitely incentivized to have larger groups.  I’ve managed to play a game where I only had one scoring type of frog, with the rest of my board filled with water, landscapes and non-scoring gold frogs. I didn’t win, but I was competitive….

It always seems good to have as many cards as possible as it will increase your options on what to play or give you more options in setting a strategy. In addition, if you get the chance to tuck cards, it’s great to have a bunch of cards you don’t need for anything else – they could turn into points, so I always try to tuck if I have the extra cards to do so.

Keep a close eye on what your opponents seem to be drawing.  You might want to shy away from a frog type that your RHO is collecting as it is unlikely for that frog to remain in the market as your RHO will surely be collecting them right before you. Similarly, watch what your LHO is collecting, and you can either switch gears to take the frogs that LHO wants, or if nothing else, you can hate draft if all other options are equal.

The game starts out slowly in our group as the bulk of the strategy is in the early turns when you’re trying to figure out what to collect and then drafting/drawing cards to implement the strategy.  For me, the second half of Pondscape goes fairly quickly.  I often already have the cards I want to play for the last 5 to 6 rounds – and by that point in the game, it’s unlikely that I’ll find something else that will offer more points.

More often than not, I’ll lay out those cards that I intend to play face up on the table in a separate area – just so I don’t get off track.  Sure, maybe a surprising 5th plant will show up in the market and I’ll have to calculate which card has a marginal gain; but for me, much of the endgame is already set, and I’m pretty much just trying to draft cards that other people want.

The art is cartoony though more realistic than cute.  The icons on the cards are pretty easy to follow, though folks may need a bit of reminding that the icons in the upper right of the frogs do not count for food icons – they only show what is available on the back.  My one quibble with the components is that I wish that each player had a player aid – to give the rulebook descriptions of how the different frogs score as well as a personal copy of the scoring chart.  The one small card with the scoring chart ends up being hard to see by everyone, and there are lots of times that players need to calculate whether a 4th blue frog might be worth more than a 3rd different landscape, etc.

Pondscape is a middleweight grid game that is definitely deeper than it appears. There are plenty of options on how to score, and you’ll be challenged to find the best scoring path as you build your grid up one card at a time.  It’s best to try to remain a bit flexible so that you can pivot if you suddenly aren’t able to collect the type of frog you were hoping for.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Doug G.: Shelley and I LOVE this game and it made it into the Top 3 of both of our Top 10 lists this past year. As Dale says, it’s a middleweight grid-building game with just enough complexity to put it above some of its cousins. It’s currently our go to “20 minutes until dinner” game and well worth checking out. We reviewed it on Episode 1029 of the audio podcast, and did a video review as well – https://youtu.be/RxhmfEzmhvM

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Doug G.
• I like it.
• Neutral. Dale, John P
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3MDErXy