Perilous Pond

“Life’s not always easy for a small frog. The lily pond is filled with danger and challenges making every day a struggle for survival.”

Perilous pond is a game about rolling dice and trying to make the best out of the final result. Doing this is a bit of a spatial puzzle, moving your frog into a position with lots of options for future turns while still keeping safe from the pike. The game is suitable for everyone, a simple and fun mechanic kids easily master and a depth of strategy that gives the game another dimension.

The pond is not a static playing field. As you and your opponents move your frogs around, chasing fireflies, the pond will change. As a frog hops across the pond the lily pads will first be submerged and if pushed off of once more sink completely. This makes the pond harder and harder to navigate as the game progresses.

The dice in the game are custom made, each side showing a possible action.

“But beware, the game board will change treacherously as you move across the pond. And what’s worse, something far more dangerous lurks beneath the surface…”

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Contents

Resources
From around the web
The Game

Resources

English Rules
Swedish Rules

Perilous Pond from around the web

Here is a collection of links and videos about Perilous Pond.

How to play video by Jenders Gaming
Preview by the Game Court
Preview by the Tabletop Gaming Guild
[Swedish] Lär dig Spela explains the rules of Perilous Pond

The game

Components

  • 5 custom dice
  • 4 frog meeples
  • 1 pike meeple
  • 1 round tracking card
  • 4 pike cards
  • 20 lily-pad cards
  • 24 pond objective cards
  • 1 boatload of fire fly gems in four vibrant colors.

Setup

The lily pond is build up from a set of lily pad cards. These are shuffled before laying them out creating a new pond each time. In addition, your chosen start positions will affect how the starting set of fireflies are placed. 

A 4-player setup. Using all the 20 lily pad cards, a 2-player game would remove a waterlily of each colour making the pond smaller.
A 4-player setup. Using all the 20 lily pad cards, a 2-player game would remove a waterlily of each colour making the pond smaller.

Players start their turn with rolling dice to determine which actions they’ll will use to help their frog catch fireflies and fulfill objective cards. The dice may be re-rolled twice but each time there’s a risk of getting the pike. A Pike result can’t be re-rolled and will trigger the dreaded pike to move at the end of the turn.

After the set of actions have been determined by the dice these are resolved and you move your frog across the pond and if all goes well catch some delicious fireflies along the way.

This becomes a puzzle of catching fireflies and maneuvering into a good position, making as many possibly results of the dice to work in your favor, for your next turn.

All rolled actions must be used so be ware, you might navigate your frog down into the water to the pike if you are careless with your rolls.

The walk action is the most basic of movements. It will allow you to get close to the yummy fireflies or to position yourself for other actions and upcoming turns.

Jumping let’s you cover vast stretches, traverse open water and event let you get past the Pike. This powerful move comes at the price of less precision than the move action and will always affect the waterlilies.

Use your stretchy tongue to catch the yummiest fireflies or flick an opponent out of the way. The more Catch/Push results used the longer your tongue will reach.

As food grows sparse the ability to lure in more fireflies into the pond will come in handy.

Manipulating lily pads might seem dull in the beginning of the game but by turn 7 raising or moving a lily pad may be critical to avoid ending up in the water where the dangerous Pike lurks. And if you don’t need it for yourself you can always make life a little harder for some other frog!

Make sure to pay attention to the pikes that were rolled and adjust your plan accordingly. You don’t want to make a mistake and end up Pike-food after snacking on a firefly yourself.

After you’ve resolved all actions, any rolled pike results are handled. The pike result will indicate the next lily pad the Pike will swim to as well as the order. The results are always handled in the order they were rolled, but if several were rolled at the same time you will chose the order. If the pike, during it’s movement, lands on a card with a frog, it will scare the frog. The player of the scared frog will lose 1 firefly of their choice.

At the end of the turn you may fulfill objective cards. These are fulfilled by performing specific actions during your the turn. The objectives ranges from placing a set of new fireflies into the pond to pushing an opponent or jumping over the pike and will reward you with more juicy fireflies.

A selection of objective cards.

After 10 turns the game is over. The player with the most fireflies of a certain colour as well as the one who completed the most objective cards will receive bonus fireflies.

When all bonuses have been distributed it’s time for scoring. Points are awarded for each caught firefly, the tastiest fireflies are worth the most points.

Your score will not only determine the winner but also the different frog species fare, inspired by the real life conservation status classifications. Will your frog be extinct, endangered, vulnerable, viable or dominant?