Leap frog over frog and clear the stone pond down to one
This is a quiet puzzle about a pond of stone lily pads and the carved frogs that sit on them. The idea is old and beautifully stubborn: every move removes one frog, and a pond that began crowded has to end with a single one still sitting there.
Playing is simple to learn. Tap a carved frog to pick it up, then tap a glowing pad two steps away. The frog leaps straight over its neighbour and eats it, landing on the empty pad beyond. That neighbour is gone, the pond is one frog lighter, and the shape of what remains has quietly changed. A leap is only legal over an occupied pad and onto an empty one, so each capture both opens a path and closes several others.
The real game is in the chain. One leap is trivial; twelve leaps in the right order is a puzzle. Frogs stranded in a far corner with nothing left to jump over are frogs you can no longer remove, so you learn to work inwards, to keep a spare neighbour in reserve, and to avoid emptying the centre too early. Experienced players start to read a pond the way you read a knot — looking for the thread that, pulled first, lets everything else come loose.
Later ponds add a second demand. It is no longer enough to finish with one frog: that last frog must come to rest on the marked pad. A sequence that clears the board perfectly but leaves the survivor one pad adrift is a near miss, and near misses are where the game becomes genuinely interesting. You begin planning backwards from the marked pad, asking which frog should be the last one standing, and shaping the whole chain to deliver it there.
There are fifteen ponds in all, arranged so the early ones teach the habits the later ones will test. Each is a small, closed problem with a definite solution, the kind you can turn over slowly while sitting somewhere still, undo a few times, and finally see whole.
No timer hurries you and no score judges you. There is only the pond, the frogs, and the satisfying moment when the pattern you have been staring at for ten minutes suddenly resolves into an order that works.