Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Ambitious Amphibians
This adorable frog game caught my eye at Gen Con this year as I walked by Brother Ming Games who, despite not having a traditional booth, had a powerful presence thanks to their games and infectious enthusiasm in the gaming hall.
As I get more entrenched in my game writing, I find myself looking for titles I can convince my wife to play with me. She’s a hard sell on theme over mechanics, and the bright cover art with smiling frogs, adorable wooden frog meeples (frogples?), and all-around cuteness seemed like a winner.
But upon further inspection, it’s an area control game? Conflict games are tough to table.
But wait, it’s also a deck-builder and not necessarily a “battle” game?
Tell me more, Mr. Frog!
Pond began life on BackerKit and completely smashed its funding goal, raising more than six times its $20,000 target from nearly 2,000 backers.
Pond Party
Pond is an asymmetric (optionally so) area control game where players lead different frog factions vying for control of the meadow. Each player starts with a slightly different deck, which serves as the main vessel for carrying out actions throughout the game.
Players begin by deploying a frog meeple anywhere they have a fwog (yes, it’s a fwog), which essentially acts as a spawning beacon but doesn’t participate in combat itself.
From there, players use the cards in their hands to perform as many actions as they can afford. These include deploying additional frogs, marching around the board, or battling when sharing a space with another faction.
Combat is resolved with simple die rolls, with each friendly meeple adding another die. Swords remove an opposing piece, bombs do the same but take one of your own frogs with them, and a miss is, well, a miss.
At the end of each turn, players check every section where they hold the majority and score accordingly, taking point chits from a limited pool.
Players can also improve their decks by spending berries at the market, and in typical deck-building fashion, this is “use it or lose it” currency.
One other wrinkle comes from Hero Frogs, powerful cards that grant ongoing effects or some other juicy boon, effectively building an engine. These are paid for using “hibernated” cards. When your deck empties and you need to draw, you can set aside a card from your discard pile to hibernate before reshuffling, creating a clever built-in deck-culling mechanism.
The game ends when the final point chit is taken. Players then tally the chits they’ve collected along with any points printed on cards they’ve acquired, and the frog with the fattest point pile wins.
Fantastic Fwogs
This game was a surprise hit with my group.
During setup, there were a few puzzled looks around the table because Pond looks much more like a kids’ game than a deep tactical experience. I’ll admit I felt the same way initially, but as I watched the tutorial videos beforehand, I kept thinking, “Oh yeah, this is going to be fun.”
The beauty of Pond is that while it’s an area control game at its core, there are enough other systems layered on top to give players different paths toward victory. The majority of your points will come from controlling territory, but the map is spacious enough that even in a four-player game, players can establish little front lines and passively score without immediately conquering their way across half the board.
This is especially important because some of my players don’t like direct conflict and therefore aren’t aggressively marching into their neighbors’ spaces. Unlike many traditional “dudes on a map” games, though, control here can simply be won by having more pieces somewhere.
That’s right: combat exists, but it isn’t required.
There’s no forced attacking, and because attacks themselves require card actions, sometimes winning really is just a numbers game. Even when battles do break out, they rarely create that dreaded “feel bad” experience because players can continually deploy more frogs wherever they have fwogs on the board. With four fwogs available to each player and only 10 regular troops per player (12 in a two-player game), you’ll almost always have something hopping around the map.
Then there are the cards.
Aside from pairing tongue-in-cheek humor with adorable frog art, the cards feel surprisingly distinct and create some fantastic combinations. They remove pieces, add pieces, manipulate movement, and can completely alter the board state.
This also makes Pond feel much more tactical than strategic. You can certainly hatch a long-term plan, but there’s a good chance the board will look completely different by the time play makes its way back around to you.
Lily pads are another mechanic that fits nicely into the overall amphibian war. These can be placed in ponds, and players sitting on them earn an additional victory point each turn. That means you can double-dip on an area or even score despite not controlling the territory itself.
It’s a fun way to scrape up some extra drip each turn, especially when you’re sitting deep in enemy territory. Just don’t get too comfortable, because that extra drip gives everyone else a pretty good reason to come knocking.
“You gone, I’m on.”
The main box includes four different factions, each with its own special ability. The asymmetry can be removed for an easier first teach, but once everyone understands the game, the factions add another layer of personality. Cowboys can reroll dice, while Wizards can merge frogs into fwogs, among other wonderfully silly abilities.
Even better, the market decks contain “upgraded” versions of these frogs. So if you find yourself eyeballing another faction’s power, there’s a chance you can grab a little slice of it for yourself.
Combined with how variable the card powers are, you end up building a customized frog faction that probably won’t look quite the same twice.
Oh, and the fwogs are great.
There’s an added layer of silliness that comes from everyone around the table sounding like a child with a lisp every time they announce one.
King of the Lily Pad
Pond surprised me in all the right ways. It has cute components, genuinely deep tactical play, and, perhaps most importantly for my table, a way to enjoy area control with people who are usually averse to combat.
Even in a four-player game, we only saw maybe a third of the Frog and Hero cards available, leaving a massive amount of the game unexplored and giving Pond a healthy dose of replayability.
All of its systems feel balanced in a way that encourages you to dabble in a little bit of everything, and I never felt like there was one obvious path guaranteed to produce a victory. Wrap all of that into roughly an hour of playtime, and I’m already itching to get it back to the table. Safe to say, Pond is definitely in my top 10 games for the year.
If you get a chance to play Pond, hop on it. You won’t regret your time.
Just remember to pronounce “fwog” correctly every single time, and you’ll always leave Pond with a smile.
Pond details
- Designer: MingYang Lu
- Artists: PondHQ
- Publishers: Board Zeppelin, Brother Ming Games
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 2 - 4
- Age range : 13+
- Time range : 30 - 60 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Area Majority / Influence, Deck, Bag, and Pool Building, Variable Player Powers
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.71531 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
- More articles about Pond.
