Disclaimer: A copy of Pond was provided by the publisher for review purposes

I used to say that how a game looks didn’t matter to me. I said it most often about video games. I never cared for the realistic graphics the AAA industry pushed to sell a game, because what I ultimately cared about was gameplay. Give me pixel art, give me the NES, the Super Nintendo, the Atari quality graphics, whatever. It didn’t matter to me how a game looked as long as the gameplay was fun.

I’m starting to realize I may feel differently about board games. Case-in-point, POND.

POND is an area majority conflict game from Brother Ming Games, designed by MingYang Lu, and published in 2025 after a successful crowdfunding campaign. Area majority and direct conflict games are two genres I don’t traditionally enjoy, yet I can’t help being utterly charmed by Pond’s visual presentation.

POND is a simple game to play. Each player takes control of one of four frog factions with their own asymmetric abilities. Every faction has two kinds of units. The little frogs are your troops on the ground, the creatures that do battle with one another. Then you have your Long Fwooogs (Yes, that’s literally what they’re called, and you’re contractually obligated to say fwooogs every time you reference them), which function more like spawn points and point pinatas. At the start of every turn, each Long Fwooog spawns one little frog. The Long Fwooogs count toward claiming the majority in a pond, but they themselves can’t attack and can’t be removed from the map by battle. They exist to put new frogs on the table and to be juicy point piñatas for your opponents to come and beat the stuffing out of for major points.

After spawning, you move into your main phase. You hold five cards and play them to do the actions printed on them. It’s more Dominion-style than anything else, where you just follow the rules on every card to deploy, march, battle, build, and more. Some cards will let you gain berries, which are an ethereal resource that doesn’t persist between rounds, so you use them or lose them. Berries are spent on new frog cards, which go into your discard pile. At the end of your turn you score one point for every pond where you hold the majority of frogs, and ties don’t count. You also score one point for every lily pad one of your frogs is sitting on. If you ever find yourself in a pond with an empty lily pad during your turn, you may move one of your frogs onto it for free. Then every card you played goes to your discard pile, you draw five new cards, and play passes to the next player.

When you need to reshuffle your deck, you must first exhaust one of your frogs, which removes it from your deck entirely, but not from the entire game. The exhausted frogs become a second resource, as there are Hero Frog cards you can pick from, and the only way to pay for them is to consume your exhausted frogs. Those Hero frogs offer players persistant, permanant powers for the rest of the game. I really appreciate that deck culling is baked in as a mechanic here, available to everyone. This mechanic also makes each player’s abilities scale up the longer the game goes on, depending on how many heroes they’ve gathered, creating a nice arc to each game of POND.

Players take turns one after another until the pool of victory points runs dry, and the moment the last point is claimed, the game ends. It ends suddenly, too. If a player was supposed to earn nine points from their controlling interests but only four points are left in the pot, they take four. The winner is whoever has the most points at the end, counting both the points they accrued during their turns and the points printed on the frog cards they acquired.

The first and most salient thing that attracted me to POND is the art and aesthetics. There’s so much style on display. The art on each frog card is delightful, with jokes and references all over the place, and the little frog meeples have tiny bums peeking back at you. I adore everything about this production. The brightly coloured board is littered with details too, and its little vignettes of frogs having misadventures are simply delightful.

The gameplay plays on my loss aversion. At first I fervently wanted to defend my ponds. “These are my ponds! You’ll take them from my cold, dead hands!”, But as the games wore on, I realized a good POND player might not care if someone comes stomping through a pond that was once theirs. What really matters is whether you can hit the other players’ Long Fwooogs harder than they’re hitting yours.

Games of POND have generally wrapped up rather quickly. In one game, a player picked up an extra exhausting card in the first round, and by the end of the game he had exhausted a total of nine cards, and held 4 hero frogs while the other two players had exhausted only three frogs each. That threw the hero frog balance completely out of whack, and he won by about 20 points.

I usually like games that let players control when the game ends. I’m not a big fan of set rounds, because if someone happens to have a fast, hot strategy, and it burns out when there’s still half a game still to go, that’s just a frustrating feeling. POND sounds like it should be in the player-controlled camp, but I think the first-player advantage is a little too steep. In most of our games the first player usually had more turns than everyone else, and more turns means more chances to score. To compensate for this first player advantage, the starting player begins with 0 victory points and everyone after gets one point increasing down the player order. But that tiny benefit doesn’t feel like the having a whole extra turn at the end of the game, especially because it’s pretty reasonable to earn eight, nine, or ten points in a single turn. It simply feels unfair.

The back of the box promotes POND as “Root if Root only took five minutes to learn”, and that’s a fair comparison. Root is MUCH harder to teach, but its asymmetries are wildly more dramatic. I wouldn’t dare call POND shallow, but it certainly doesn’t have as much depth as Root. Still, there is quite a lot to enjoy in a game that takes only five minutes to learn and plays in around 60 to 90 minutes and that looks as good as Pond does.

POND never gave the bad feelings I usually get from high-conflict games. Sure, someone stomped through one of my ponds and blasted three of my little dudes off the board, but the next turn I spawned them all right back onto into the game. There is a hard limit on how many little frogs each player can have on the board at one time, so once all your spawning frogs are out, it’s fairly easy to respawn back up to your max strength. Losing units in a combat isn’t that consequential in the end. A game of POND has a pretty decent arc, with a slow start, a tense middle, and a fast and furious race for the final points at the end. It’s satisfying in a way I don’t find in many other majority games.

There might be a runaway leader problem. If someone gets a wild head start on hero frogs, or stumbles into an incredible combo, I think it’ll be pretty difficult to catch up. But you won’t see every hero frog in every game, since the deck is thick with frogs and the combinations won’t all be available each time, making every game of POND feel varied and interesting.

I really enjoyed POND. I enjoyed the art, and I enjoyed how fast it is to learn and play. I’m also impressed by how friendly a combat-heavy game can feel. I’d recommend it especially if you have players who haven’t tried many area majority games, because it’s a great introduction to the whole genre. And really, I dare anyone to take a gander at these amphibian posteriors and not be utterly charmed.