Quagmire. How to Play. Complete, Clear, Concise Board Game Tutorial

Leap across lily pads, chomp flies, and outmaneuver rival amphibians to position yourself right in Quagmire. >> And today we'll be teaching you how to play Quagmire, >> [music] >> game designed by Chris Handy and published by Perplexed. >> And hey everyone, it's Stella. >> And Tarrant, welcome to Meeple University.

>> And hey, if you enjoyed this video after watching, like, subscribe, and comments. You know what to do. Now let's get to the classroom. >> Frogs. Predictable creatures, they will hop their way around the local bog according to a pre-planned path. When left alone, nothing can go wrong. But when many frogs compete to move over the same bog, that's where the conflict arises.

In Quagmire, two to four players take on the roles of teams of frogs as they try to move, complete their paths, capture their rivals, or look to score big as they make patterns among the lily pads. Whoever can score the most points before someone ends the game will be the winner. To set up, lay out the board.

Each player must choose a different side to sit at, and in the two-player game, players must sit opposite. Choose a first player, play will proceed clockwise. Lay out the lily pads in a square. In the two-player game, place these four lily pads beetle side up in these positions relative to the seating positions.

At three or four players, flip the beetles face down. These beetles are the only thing which have any impact on gameplay. These other illustrations, flowers and water drops, are purely decorative. Place a fly on each of the four central pads. Set up the frog tiles. The game comes with 36 and you'll use nine per player.

At two players, use the 18 showing this icon. At three players, shuffle all of the tiles together and remove nine at random. At four players, use all of the tiles. Then shuffle all frogs into a face-down deck and each player draws a starting face-down hand of either three or four frogs, depending on the player count and their position in starting turn order.

With the remaining frogs, make two face-up draw piles of roughly equal size. You're now ready to play. >> Quagmire plays in turns clockwise from the starting player. >> And on your turn, you must take a single action with one of your frogs. >> There are four different options. Play a frog, move a frog, complete a frog's route, or discard a frog to score a formation.

First is play a frog. Look at the frog tokens in your hand, choose one, and place it face-up on the shore space on your side of the board. Each shore can accommodate at most two frogs. So, if your shore is full, then you cannot take this action. Your second option is to move a frog one step. Each frog tile has a pre-programmed path of four steps, and this is the pathway it must take when moving.

So, for example, this frog, across four separate move actions, must move from the shore to this pad, then to this pad, then to this pad, and then to this pad. Exactly which pads a frog will step on depends on which player played the frog. Meaning that this frog, if played by the player on the left, will step on these four pads.

But, had the frog been played by the player on the right-hand side, it would be these four pads. Frogs are never rotated. From the moment you play one onto your shore, always leave it rotated such that it is upright from your perspective. So, in summary, to move a frog, choose any frog that you have previously played, that is, one that's facing your direction, whether it's on your shore or on a pad, and jump it straight to the next pad on its path.

Two effects could be triggered when you move. The first is that you could eat a fly. This is the main way for you to add new frogs to your hand. Immediately choose the top frog from either of the face-up draw stacks and add it face down to your hand. Then move the fly to a different lily pad of your choice, which is not in the row of pads closest to you, and which doesn't already contain a frog, a fly, or in the two-player game, a beetle.

In this case, these are my four valid destinations. In the event that there are no valid destinations, choose a pad with a frog. That frog does not eat the fly immediately. It's the next frog to land on that pad who would get to eat the fly. The other possible trigger is landing on another frog. If you move a frog to a space containing another frog, then remove that squashed frog from the board, flip it over, and place it in your one-point scoring slot.

Each frog you squash scores you one point at the end of the game. It is legal to squash your own frog, but unlike squashing an opponent's, you do not keep the frog for scoring. Simply discard it from the game. >> Ugh, something has to have gone seriously wrong for you to want to squash your own frog.

Right, frog? Are you hungry, Terrence? >> Indeed. Now, the third action, and one of the big scoring actions, is to complete a frog route. If one of your frogs has made it to the final starred space on its path, and has survived until the start of a turn without being squashed, then you can spend your turn completing that frog's route.

Remove the frog from the board, flip it over, and place it in the scoring slot matching the player count. The higher the player count, the higher scoring this action will be. The last option for your turn is to score a formation. And for this, you'll need a frog tile still in your hand. Reveal the tile face up.

You'll see that four of the 16 dots are in a lighter shade of green, and these correspond to four of the pads on the board. Again, read their positions from your perspective where you sit. You now score one point for each frog, whether yours or an opponent's, currently in those four spaces. Flip the tile down and place it in the appropriate scoring slot.

You must score at least one point from your formation for the action to be legal. And so those are your four options. Playing a frog to your shore, moving a frog on its path, completing a frog's route, or discarding a frog to score a formation. Passing is not an option. You must take one of these actions on your turn, even if you don't want to.

The exception is if none of these actions are possible. Something which can only happen if you have no frogs on the board or in your hand. When this happens, first lose three points. Simply discard frogs from your scoring slots equal to three points, or lose all your points if you currently have fewer than three.

Then draw two frogs from the deck to your hand, and then immediately play one of them to your shore. Once the final frog has been drawn from the draw decks, you have entered the end game. From this point forward, when a player's frog collects a fly, it is not repositioned and no new frogs are drawn.

Instead, the fly is removed and collected for end game scoring, where it will score one point. The game then ends as soon as play passes to any one player who is unable to legally take an action. Unlike what would happen when there was still frogs in the deck, the player who can't take an action does not lose any penalty points.

Now, count up your final scores by counting the frogs and flies in each scoring slot. The player with the highest score wins, and if tied, victory is shared. >> So, thanks for watching, and if you like this video, maybe you'd like to watch this next one. Have a great day. Bye.