Top Frog - Official How to Play. Complete, Clear, Concise Board Game Tutorial.

A truck full of costumes crashes into a pond. Now frogs are leaping into fashion stardom where the style is stacked and everyone wants the best hat in Top Frog. And today we'll be teaching you how to play Top Frog game designed by Eric Yadvish and published by Yadco Games. We're using a prototype copy of the game, so the rules and components may not be final.

Check out the link to the project page in the video description below. And hi everyone, it's Stella and Tarant. Welcome to Mabel University. And hey, if you enjoy this video after watching, like, subscribe, and comments. You know what to do. All right, now let's get to the classroom. Top Frog is a tactical game of frog stacking for two to six players.

Using a simultaneous choice of cards to take their actions, players will hop around the pond trying to get to the best frogs or play their catch cards at the right times to catch them and then stack them into up to three stacks to earn points and bonuses. These stacks of frog fashionistas are having fun with the hats which have been accidentally dropped into their pond.

And if you can collect a hat coupon, you can place a hat on a stack, unlocking that hat's scoring bonus as well. But be warned, it's a competitive pond out there, and if two players try to catch the same frog, they'll both be leaving empty-handed. The setup of the game will vary depending on your number of players.

And first, I'll step you through the three player setup and then show you what's different at the other player counts. Shuffle the frog deck and deal out the pond into a 3x3 grid of frogs. Place the whirlpool markers in their central spaces. Shuffle up all of the hat scoring cards and deal five face up into a display.

Return the rest of these to the box. Count out hat coupon cards equal to the number of hat scoring cards and shuffle those into the frog deck. Deal out the river, which is a row of three face up cards from this frog and hat coupon deck. Find the hat tokens matching the hats in play and place them on their cards.

Make a supply of the purple bonus cards and of nat tokens. Each player chooses a frog and places it in the middle space of the pond. Finally, scan the pond for any cards showing this icon and resolve the text effect on that card immediately. This was the setup for three players. At two players, you'll use a smaller pond, only three hats, and start the frogs here.

At four players, you'll use the same pond as three players, but you'll add a sixth hat. At five players, you'll add cards showing this little plus icon to the frog deck. You'll use a larger pond. Starting here, you'll use eight hats and a river of four cards. And at six players, add a ninth hat. Always shuffle in as many hat coupons as there are hat scoring cards.

Give each player their set of six action cards. This will be catch, rest, leap north, leap west, leap south, and leap east. All players place catch in their personal face up discard piles and hold the other cards face down in hand. Shuffle and deal each player two lily pads. Players look at them, choose one to keep, placing it face down and returning the other to the box.

You're now ready to play. Top Frog is played in rounds, and each round is played in four phases: action selection, reveal, resolution, and cleanup. There are no turns in Top Frog. Each of these phases is resolved simultaneously for all players. At any given time, you'll have a hand and a personal discard pile of your action cards.

And what's in your hand drives what actions you can take in any given round. First, during action selection, if you have any gnats, you may spend at most one of them to look through and retrieve any one card from your discard pile to your hand. Do note unspent gnats will be worth one point at the end of the game.

So do make sure spending the point on this is worth it. Then the main thing each player will do during the action selection phase is choose one card from hand and play it face down on the table. This is their chosen action for this round. If you've chosen your card, but then someone else chooses to spend a nat to pick up one of their discards, you can swap out the card you chose.

Once everyone's selected, go to the reveal phase and reveal the chosen cards. Then you'll move to resolution. Here you'll resolve all players chosen cards, starting with anyone who chose a leap card, then anyone who chose rest, and then anyone who chose catch. These actions could result in taking actions with your mele on the pond.

It may result in you retrieving cards from your discard pile to your hand. You might gain some new nat tokens and you might catch a frog or a hat. We'll cover each of these in more detail shortly, but resolve all leaps simultaneously, then all rests, then all catches. Finally, in the cleanup phase, all players move the cards they played this round to their personal discard piles.

and you'll refresh the pond, moving cards from the right of the river into any empty spaces from left to right, top to bottom before replenishing the river. So now let's look at each action card in detail. First is leap. And there are four different leap cards. Leap north, south, east, or west. All leaps are resolved simultaneously.

When you leap, move your frog one space in the direction shown. Then look through your discard pile. If you have any rest or catch cards, you may take one of each and return them to your hand. Then in cleanup, you'll discard the leap. If you leap off the map to the whirlpool token, then you wrap around to the space next to the opposite Whirlpool token on the other side of the board.

then retrieve, arrest, and catch as usual. However, if you try to leap out of the map onto a space which does not have the whirlpool token, then you stay where you were, you don't get to retrieve a rest or catch, and you'll simply discard the card at the end of the round. You won't usually want to do this, although it could be a useful bluff in some circumstances.

After leap, resolve rest. If you rest and your frog is in a space by itself, and to be clear, this is as the board lies after everyone has left, then return all cards from your discard pile to your hand. This does not include the rest itself, which will get discarded at cleanup. If you rested and you're on the same card as one or more other players, then you still retrieve all cards from your discard pile to hand, but you also gain one nat.

Then if this was the case and one or more of the players who share the space with you played catch, then you gain a second nat. In this way, resting is most beneficial when you share spaces with other players. After rest, you'll resolve catches. The catch action is the one that you'll play to try to collect frogs and hat coupons from the pond.

However, to successfully catch, you must be the only player on your card who plays a catch card. If more than one player plays catch on the same card, those catches are squandered. Resolve squanders before successful catches. Here, blue and brown have squandered. They do not collect the card, and one NAT token gets placed on each orthogonally adjacent card.

If you squandered on a frog, then nothing else happens. But if you squandered on a hat coupon, that card gets placed on the bottom of the draw deck. The exception is in the two-player game where any squandered card, whether it's a frog or a hat coupon, goes to the bottom of the deck. The action cards from the squander will be discarded in cleanup.

After resolving squanders, resolve any successful catches. Here, orange is the only one to catch on this space. So, after the rest ability is resolved for blue, orange will catch this card. Take the card as well as any nat tokens on it. You'll discard your catch in cleanup and refill the pond from the right hand side of the river.

So, what do you do with the cards you catch? In most cases, you'll be catching frogs and you immediately place it into one of your frog stacks. You can have at most three frog stacks. One of them will start from your lily pad and the others are placed beside. You always stack frogs from bottom to top.

Meaning a new frog must become the topmost one of its stack. And frog stacks need to be stable. Meaning you have to have heavy frogs on the bottom and lighter frogs on top. If ever a frog is placed, it must have equal or lower weight than the one it's being placed on. So this frog could be placed here or here, but could not go on to the middle stack.

Sometimes you may catch a frog but not want to place it immediately. For example, this has one weight and I may want to get some intermediate weight frogs onto these stacks before putting this one on top. As such, when you gain a frog, you're allowed to add it to your hand of action cards up to a maximum of one frog in your hand.

Later on, if you ever collect a different frog that you want to hold in your hand, you'll have to discard the first one to make space for the new one. When at a later point in the game you want to add the card to your stack, you play that frog face down as your action card selection for the round. Then after players have revealed, you move it to the stack of your choice during resolution.

You're also within your rights to catch a frog which you either can't or don't wish to play. And you may do this simply to disrupt your opponents. Anytime you catch a frog, you may choose to discard it to the bottom of the draw deck. The other type of card you can catch is a hat coupon, and this allows you to gain one of the hat cards, which was placed face up in setup.

Unlike taking a frog, gaining a hat with a coupon is mandatory, unless you have no legal stack to place one on. And a legal stack is a stack of at least one frog, which doesn't already have a hat. Choose whichever one of the available hats you wish. Collect the card and place its matching token on top of one of your stacks.

This stack is now capped. You can no longer add another frog on top nor another hat. In final scoring, this stack will score points based on this hat's objective. And all of these involve making combinations of frogs of certain colors. For the fairy hat, for example, it's points for purples. This stack has two purples, so it would be worth four points plus one point for each pink.

So that's a total of seven. Had I instead gone for the party hat, this would be two points per two cards, regardless of color. So here, six points. Had I instead picked the sprout, that's seven points for having three pink minus one for the blue. A total of six. As such, it's all about taking the hat, which will score you the most points.

Remove a successfully used hat coupon from the game entirely. Also influencing your play will be the frog powers, as each frog has some sort of power. There are five different types represented by these different icons. The power showing an eyeball is passively available to you as long as that card is visible on top of one of your stacks.

Right now, I can use all three of these powers. And if I later caught and placed this frog, I would lose access to the power on the eightweight frog, but gain access to this one. Visible powers are also lost once a frog stack gains a hat. A frog with this icon gains its effect at the moment that you place another frog on top of it.

So at that point, nothing happens. But if I placed this frog here, I will have met the requirements of placing a groom directly on top of this groom and would therefore gain two mats. A card with this icon has a special effect relating to its weight. For example, here I could count it as either three or six and could change which one I'm counting it as during the stacking.

For example, legally stacking this one as a three and then legally stacking this one as a six. As another example, this one has weight, but you're allowed to place it under an existing stack, even one which already has its hat. A card with this icon doesn't resolve its effect in your tableau. Instead, this gets resolved at the moment that you move it from the river to the pond.

These result in more gnats going into play. And as you'll recall, you resolved these during setup as well. Finally, if a card shows this icon, you resolve its effect immediately as soon as it's added to a stack, whether to an existing stack or starting its own. Many of these effects tell you to gain a bonus action card, and those are these purple cards, which we set aside during setup.

Go through this deck and find the specific card it tells you to gain, and add the card to your hand. On any subsequent action selection phase, you are allowed to play at most one action card, but also any number of bonus action cards. Place them all face down. And you don't need to tell your opponents whether you've played a bonus card or not.

When the time comes to reveal, reveal them both. And in resolution, you'll resolve your action card as modified by your bonus. Here for Gallup, it allows you to leap two spaces instead of one without modifying the rules related to the catch and rest cards. Bonus action cards are discarded like your normal action cards and can be regained like the others.

That is by paying a nap during action selection or by playing your rest. There are also some of these purple cards which are full-on action cards rather than bonus action cards. These must be played alone, that is, you can't play any of your other action cards in the same turn. and this could result in you having multiple catch cards in your hand.

If you have two in your discard pile, the leap effect still allows you to retrieve only one. The game ends at the end of the round in which there aren't enough cards left in the draw deck or river to refill the pond, or the round when the last hat is taken, or at the end of the round after the round in which one player gains a third hat.

Count up your final scores, which come from four sources. You'll gain the raw points printed on each frog in your stacks. For stacks with hats, score that stack based on the hat card as described before. Reveal your lily pad card and if you've met the objective on that card for the stack associated with it, gain the printed points.

Finally, gain one point for each leftover gnat. The player with the highest score wins. If tied, most hats breaks the tie. If still tied, single tallest stack of frogs. And if still tied, victory is shared. Thanks for watching. And if you like this video, maybe you'd like to watch this next one. Have a great day.

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