After playing hundreds of moves (but only actually finishing a few games), here's my first evaluation of Frog Legs.

Play wise, it's quite boring. There's no real strategy, except from avoiding playing bad moves. If both players don't play any obvious bad moves, the game boils down to filling up allmost all the squares, delaying having to reveal essential information until there's no other move. And then it becomes a game of luck, with the frog(s) to reveal only having two or three squares. Games will last 70 to 80 moves, which, I think, will rank them along the longest games found here on BK.

As for strategy, I use the following guidelines:

• Never guess unless the chance the square contains a frog exceeds 50%.


• If you can shoot a square that is only surrounded by squares of which it's known whether they contain a frog or not, shoot it.


• Never shoot a square that has only one unknown neighbour (an unknown neighbour is a square of which it's unknown wether it contains a frog or not) - you'll give your opponent 5 points if the square reveals a 1. (See below).


• Avoid shooting squares that have an odd number of unknown neighbours; if the number reveals the same number as the number of unknown neighbours, your opponent can guess one more frog than you do. (This is a generalisation of the previous point).

Of course, the current score can influence things. If there are only N frogs to be found, and your are ahead more then 5 * N, by all means, narrow down where the frogs are as soon as possible - it's ok if your opponent guesses the remaining frogs.

Here's an example of where you shouldn't shoot:

   +---+---+---+
 3 |   |   |   |
   +---+---+---+
 2 | 0 |   |   |
   +---+---+---+
 1 |   | 0 |   |
   +---+---+---+
     a   b   c

Don't shoot at b2. It's already known that a1, a3, c2 and c1 do not contain frogs; c3 is the only unknown neighbour of b2. So, if b2 reveals a 1, there will be a frog at c3 with 100% probability. Unless your opponent is making a very stupid mistake, you will lose 5 points.