After last week’s intergalactic alien hunt, this week we moved to a Danish pond i.e. we played Frog Rush (Lego, 2011). I see Frog Rush as an example of a replacement game i.e. the winner is the first player to get all their pieces across to the opposite of the board, and occupy the spaces that the other player started in. Examples of replacement games include Chinese Chequers and Halma.
In Frog Rush, each player has five frogs. There is a special die, a roll of which determines that the player can either: move one frog either 1, 2 or 3 spaces in any direction; leapfrog over an adjacent frog to an empty space; move the stork to capture a frog which is on the pond. When all of one player’s frogs have reached their home, or all of one player’s frogs have been captured by the stork, the game ends. Each frog on a home bench scores 3 points, each frog on a home rock scores 2 points, and each frog on a home shore scores 1 point. The most points wins.
It didn’t take the children long to work out a strategy: a frog on the pond is vulnerable to capture by the stork, so they moved their frogs around the pond along the shore. This took a bit longer but was definitely safer. The children played in pairs, and also as a four. As a four things did get a little congested and the game lasted longer than we expected.
There was just enough time for a quick game of Five Field Kono, a lovely replacement game from Korea. There is no jumping over or capturing, just pure movement in space as each player moves one piece from an intersection to the next empty intersection. Players can move forwards and backwards, and will at some point have to move backwards when the other player blocks their path.
Next week we will play Zone X, a game where one player hides a target and the other player has to find out where the target is in the fewest number of moves.