Quagmire - How To Play
Transcript
Hi and welcome to Watch It Played. My name is Rodney Smith and in this video we're going to learn the two to four player game Quagmire, designed by Chris Handy and published by Perplexed, who helped sponsor this video. Sure, the pond in this box is full of lily pads, but the frogs inside are not very good at sharing. Here you'll be hopping around, going about your busy frog day, trying to outsmart your opponents for the one thing all frogs want most. Points. So, join me at the table and let's learn how to play. To set up, put this game board in the center of the play area and have each person sit along one of its edges. In a two-player game, which will be setting up in this video, each person sits on opposite sides.
Over here we have the lily pads, which you now arrange in a 4 by 4 grid onto the board, so it looks something like this when you're done. It does not matter which lily pads are in which positions, unless you have a two-player game as we have here. In that case, go through these and find the four that have a red beetle on one of their sides and ensure that these are placed on the two spaces along each person's right edge like this. Then, no matter how many players you have, add one of these fly tokens to each of the four central lily pads. Next, find the frog tokens which have this back. If you have four players, you'll use all of them, but if you have only three players, return nine random frogs back to the box. In a two-player game like we're setting up, go through the frogs by their fronts and only keep the 18 showing this symbol in the area here, returning all the rest to the box. Once you have the frogs you'll need for your game, shuffle them face down. Then the person who makes the best frog noise becomes the starting player.
Or you can just pick someone randomly. Either way, now use this table found on screen and in the rule book to deal the indicated number of frog tokens to the starting player and then continue clockwise around the table. In our two-player game, this means the first person will get three frogs and the second player will get four. If we had four players on the other hand, the first and second would get three frogs while the third and fourth player would each be dealt four. You can examine your own frogs, but keep them a secret from the other players. Place the remaining frogs face up within reach of the players split into roughly two equal halves. Then give each person one of these double-sided player references to use during the game. And that's the setup. In Quagmire, you and the other players will be competing to jump on each other, complete routes across the pond, and find valuable arrangements of frogs all in an effort to score points. Have the most points at the end of the game and you'll win.
The game is played over a series of turns beginning with the starting player and then going clockwise around and around the table. And on your turn, you can perform one of four possible actions. So, let's go through each of them starting with playing a frog. To perform this action, you put any one frog from your hand onto your shore, which is the area printed here on your side of the board. When placing your frog, ensure that it's rounded top is facing away from you. Your shore can hold at most two frogs at a time. So, if you took this action again on your next turn, you would not be able to play a frog as an action again until at least one of them is no longer there. Which brings us to the next type of action you could instead perform on your turn, advancing a frog. This lets you move one of your frogs that are already on the board. Now, to understand how this works, we need to look at the symbols on a frog tile. Each frog will have a 4 by 4 grid of green and yellow circles in the area here. For now, ignore the different colors, symbols, and dashed lines, and just pay attention to the 16 circles. They represent the matching layout of the 16 lily pads on the board.
When advancing a frog you have on the shore, look for the starting lily pad symbol on your frog's grid, which looks like this. This tells us which lily pad to move our frog onto with this action. And that's why the orientation of your frog matters. Remember, the top of your frog is always facing away from you. So, when I look at this frog and it has a starting lily pad symbol here, that refers to this matching lily pad on the board. So, advancing this frog moves it from the shore to here. If the other person had played this frog, then they would have placed it first on the shore with its top edge facing this way. And that means the starting lily pad for them would actually have been this one. When advancing a frog that has already left the shore, you look for the lily pad it is currently on and find the next one connected to it with a dashed line.
This is where it will advance to next. So, advancing this frog on a future turn would move it to this lily pad. If I advance that frog again later, we'd follow the dashed line from this position and see that our frog would now jump to here. And notice your frog's orientation never changes as it advances around the board. It's top must always be facing away from its controlling player. This not only ensures you always know which lily pads to jump to, but also you can tell which player controls which frogs. If our board looked like this, the player here controls all three of these frogs with their tops facing this way. Well, the player here controls these two frogs with their tops on this side. All right, going back to the advance of frog action. If your frog lands on a lily pad with a fly, first draw the top tile from either of the stacks into your hand and then move the fly to a lily pad that does not have a frog or fly on it. In a two-player game, you also cannot move the fly to a lily pad that shows a red beetle. Later in the game, if all of the lily pads have frogs or flies on them already, or in the case of a two-player game, if the only unoccupied lily pads have red beetles, then in that case, when you have to move a fly, you can put it on a pad with a frog. This frog doesn't automatically gain the benefit of the
fly. Someone would have to land another frog onto this lily pad later and then they would gain the benefit of this fly. Speaking of which, you can also land on a lily pad that has another frog already on it. If you advance your frog to a lily pad that has an opponent's frog on it, you land there and squash it. Take that opponent's frog from the space, flip it over, and put it into this value one slot on your side of the board. Tokens in this slot are worth one point at the end of the game. So, every frog you land on will go here and earn you one point. However, if you advance to a lily pad containing one of your own frogs, you still remove it from the board, but you do not get a point for it. Instead, return it to the box. This means you'll want to avoid landing on your own frogs if you can help it. When advancing your frog as an action, if it moves to the lily pad that shows a star on its tile, it cannot advance any further.
So, the advance of frog action could not target this frog anymore. But, that brings us to the third type of action you might instead choose to resolve on your turn, completing a frog's route. If your frog is on the lily pad marked with a star on its tile, it has reached the end of its route, and as an action, you can remove it from the lily pad, turn it over, and put it into the slot on your side of the board matching your number of players. So, in our two-player game, we'd add it to this number two slot. Each tile here will be worth two points at the end of the game. However, if we had a three-player game, a frog that completes its route is worth three points and would go here, and you'd place it here [snorts] in a four-player game. Each of these slots make up your scoring area. And just so it's clear, advancing your frog so that it gets to the last lily pad of its route does not automatically move it from the board to your scoring area. You have to wait until a later turn, and then take the complete a frog's route action to score it. But, if someone else jumps on your frog, removing it from the board before you get to score it, you won't get any points for it. Instead, they'll get a point for removing your frog.
With that, we have one last action you might instead take on your turn called discarding to score a formation. To perform this action, place a frog from your hand face up onto the table, and then look at the four matching lily pads on the board that are in the same positions as the four yellow circles on the frog's tile. Remember, as always, you must place the tile so its top is facing away from you. For this frog, its four yellow circles represent these four lily pads. You now count how many of those pads contain a frog, yours or another player's. So, in this case, one, two, three of them have frogs, which is how many points this tile scores. To show this, flip it over and add it to the value three slot on its side of the board. Just know, you cannot take the action to score a formation if you would score zero points because there are no frogs on those pads. And those are all the possible actions you can pick from on your turn, which you'll find listed on your player aid. Just remember, you can only perform one of these actions per turn. And you'll also find reminders about how points are scored here on the back. As turns are taken around and around the table, if you have no frogs in hand, it is possible you won't have an action that you can perform on your turn. And if this happens, you first lose three points. To do this, just remove a frog from your three-point slot and return it
to the box. If you didn't have a frog here to remove, just take frogs from other slots or move them to a lower slot. For example, I could lose three points this value four frog down to the one slot, or instead, I could remove both a value one and value two frog. If you do not have three points to lose, just lose what you have. Either way, after losing points, you then draw two frogs from the stacks. You are not allowed to look through the stacks as you draw, so just take each frog one at a time, but you can draw from the same stack if you want. If you're required to draw two frogs, but only one is left in the stacks, just draw that one. Either way, after drawing when you cannot perform an action on your turn, you must then add one of those frogs to your shore. I should point out, if you have an action you can take on your turn, then you must take it. You cannot choose to just lose three points and draw two frogs instead. That only happens when there are no possible actions you can perform. While playing, once a stack runs out of frogs, everyone will have to draw from the remaining one. And once all of the frogs are taken from the stacks, the end of the game is triggered. Players will keep taking turns, but from now on, when a player lands on a fly, since there are no frogs left to collect in the stacks, they instead move the fly to their value one
scoring area. Once the end of the game has been triggered and turns are continuing back and forth, eventually it will come to a player's turn and they will have no more actions they can take. And when this happens, instead of losing three points and drawing two frogs, the game just ends and you move to final scoring. Here you total the value of all the frogs in the various slots on your side of the board, scoring one extra point for each fly you have. So here I have 1 2 3 4 5 points plus 2 4 6 8 more points plus another three points for this frog and then 4 + 4 or 8 more points. That's a grand total of 24 points. After comparing points, the player with the most wins. If there's a tie, the tied players all win and share the swampy glory of the bog. And that's everything you need to know to play Quagmire. If you have any questions about anything you saw here, feel free to put them in the comments below and I'll gladly answer them as soon as I get a chance. You'll also find forums for discussion, pictures, other videos, and lots more over on the game's page at BoardGameGeek and I'll put a link to that in the description below. And if you found this video helpful, please consider giving it a like, subscribing, and clicking that little bell icon so you get notification anytime I post a new video. And if you'd like to support the channel directly, you can join the Patreon team, which I'll have linked below. But until next time, thanks for
watching.