Wonderland’s War First Impressions

Wonderland’s War has players enjoy a lovely tea party…

…then it’s off to war!

The Looking Glass has shattered, madness is being drained from the inhabitants, and war has come to Wonderland. Alice, Mad Hatter, Red Queen, Jabberwock, and Cheshire Cat must gather all that they can while playing nice at the Hatter’s Tea Party before going to battle!

Wonderland’s War Game Overview

Quick Rules Summary

Players each play as one of the above-named characters and start with a bag of tokens.

They take turns moving around the tea party table picking up one of many cards. These cards give you quests to complete or tokens to place in your bag. They also tell you how many of your meeples you put into a location on the board.

Once everyone has 4 cards, players move their character standee into one of the locations and we move on to the next phase.

Each location on the board will host a battle. Players with meeples in them will take part and start with strength equal to the value of their character plus any special characters they have in there.

Players will simultaneously draw tokens from their bags one at a time. These tokens will either increase their battle strength or cause madness. For each madness, they lose a meeple from the battle. If they run out of meeples, they drop out of the fight. The player with the most strength still in the fight when it ends wins it.

How do you win?

The winner of each battle gains points, second place gets half that many points. Players also gain points for completing quests. After 3 rounds of increasing points for the battles, the player with the most points wins.

Main Mechanisms

You have deck-building for the tokens, area control and push your luck for the battles. There is a bit of drafting for the cards and set collection for the quest cards.

USP

The theme, look and mix of mechanisms are all fairly good selling points for this game.

Theme

It is a good theme, especially if you know how violent the Alice in Wonderland world can be.

Setup

I shuffled cards when I was asked to. I let the people that knew what they were doing get on with it, it didn’t look too taxing.

Components & Artwork

The standees are good enough for this game, although we did have to keep spinning them around to see what they were. Maybe minis would be better for a game that plays 5 players.

The rest of the components and graphic design were pretty good.

The art is really fun.

Ease of Teaching

The game is quite easy to teach. To be honest, I had food delivery coming when we were setting up and it came when the game was being taught so I was distracted by Kebab and Chips. (I was very hungry)

There’s a lot to it, but it’s all quite easy to understand if you’re paying attention.

Similar Games

OK, here we go… Moving around the table to ‘gear up’ reminded me (weirdly) of Francis Drake.

The cards giving you an ability and determining how many meeples you put on the board reminded me of El Grande.

The 3 rounds of area control with different point values remind me of Ethnos.

Pulling the tokens out of the bag with the push-your-luck aspect reminded me of The Quacks of Quedlinburg, which we played earlier that day.

Wonderland’s War Review

Positives

It looks really nice and pulls people in.

The mix of mechanisms works really well.

I like the theme.

Negatives

You’re sort of at the will of other players in combat, sometimes everyone just drops out and hands it to you. Other times every stays in until the end. I never won a combat but it felt more that I had constant competition rather than anything I did.

If you’re not in a fight you can be sat there for a while just watching people draw tokens from a bag. You can bet on the winner for a reward, but as I said earlier, you can’t know what a player’s behaviours in combat will be.

Summary

A very fun mix of mechanism and pink, lots of pink.

Jesta ThaRogue