Wonderland’s War review

Wonderland’s War review

Druid City Games | 2 to 5 players | 13+ | 45 to 125 minutes

There is a moment in every game of Wonderland’s War (usually somewhere in the second round, usually when you have committed too many followers to a region you cannot win and too few to a region you absolutely must win) when you reach into your bag, feel the chips shifting under your fingers, and realise with absolute clarity that what you pull out now will decide the next fifteen minutes of your evening. You have no idea what it will be. Neither does the bag. That does not stop you from believing, with the desperate conviction of someone buying a lottery ticket, that you can feel the right chip.

You cannot.

The premise

Wonderland is at war. Not the pastel, Disney-style Wonderland of nursery posters, but a splintered, faction-ridden Wonderland in which Alice, the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts, the Cheshire Cat and the Jabberwock have each decided the realm would be better off under their rule. But first, of course, there is tea.

The game spans three rounds, each split into two halves: a drafting phase called the Tea Party, and a combat phase that, with admirable directness, is called the War. The design duo Tim and Ben Eisner, together with Ian Moss, have built something that looks like an area control game, smells like a bag builder and plays like a poker tournament in a bouncy castle.

How it really works

The Tea Party is a rondel draft. Cards are laid out in a circle; you move your leader clockwise and stop at one to claim it. Four picks per round. Cards give you follower chips for your bag, powerful Wonderland allies, quests, tower pieces, leader upgrades and sometimes shards. Shards are Wonderland's way of reminding you that everything comes at a price. What you take matters. What you leave behind for the next player matters more.

Then the War begins. Players commit followers to regions on the board, and battles are resolved one at a time. In each battle you draw chips from your bag, one at a time. Numbered followers add to your total. Wonderland characters trigger special abilities. Shard chips (madness, essentially) pile up towards a threshold that, if you cross it, sends your entire army fleeing in what can only be described as a catastrophic existential crisis.

You can stop drawing at any time. You can lock in your total, sit back and watch your opponents tempt fate. Or you can reach into the bag again, because the chip you need is definitely in there, you can almost feel it, and then…

It was a madness chip.

A madness chip, received at the start of the game and then at the start of every battle, determines how quickly you descend into madness. Sometimes luck is generous. Sometimes it is not. This is the game telling you, with the serene cruelty of a Cheshire grin, that your carefully assembled bag is a suggestion. Not a guarantee.

What it does well

The bag building is genuinely inspiring. Not because bag building is new (it is not) but because the Eisners and Moss understood something about the psychology of reaching into an opaque bag. Drawing from a bag feels different from drawing from a deck of cards. A deck is maths. A bag is faith. Your brain insists that it has some influence over the outcome.¹ It does not. But that insisting is exactly the point, and the whole game is built around that beautiful, irrational conviction.

The asymmetric factions are distinctive in ways that matter. The Mad Hatter can refresh the Tea Party offer and take a card without moving; an ability so universally useful that experienced groups sometimes roll their eyes when someone picks him. Which is, in itself, a sign of good faction design. The Queen of Hearts forces every opponent to lose a follower when she enters the area, the kind of ability that makes people remember your name. The Jabberwock poisons Tea Party cards and sows madness in opponents' bags, like a guest who brings wine and a grudge to the dinner party.

The thematic integration is unusually strong. Madness is not just a punishment; it is Wonderland's operating principle. The chaos of battle, the unreliable allies, the way a perfectly sound strategy can dissolve into nonsense with the draw of a single chip: that is Wonderland. The game does not use its theme as wallpaper. It uses it as a load-bearing structure.

And then there is the art by Manny Trembley: bold, saturated, expressively cartoonish. It holds the whole thing together visually. Each of the 185 cards looks as if it has been torn from a graphic novel you would actually want to read.

¹ Dan Thurot of Space-Biff put this nicely. He observed that the bag evokes a different sensation from a deck of cards: our ignorant brain imagines it is in control. It is not. It never was.

What we liked less

The setup. Two hundred and thirty-five chips. Several card decks. Asymmetric player boards. A large central board with regions and tracks and castles and… look, you need the Game Trayz insert or a very organised friend, and even then you should allow fifteen minutes before anyone touches a card. Packing away is the same process in reverse, with the added indignity of sorting chips back into the right bags while someone asks whether you fancy another game.

With five players, the game stretches to three hours. That is not necessarily a problem; some of the best games in the hobby ask for three hours. But Wonderland’s War at three hours feels like a game that knows it should last two and simply… does not. The battles pile up, downtime creeps in, and the push-your-luck tension that sings with three or four players starts to lose its pitch.

The luck question is real. You can build your bag with surgical precision, tilt the odds in your favour, play the draft perfectly, and then draw three madness chips in a row in the battle that matters most. This will happen. It will happen to you specifically, in a game you were winning, and you will feel as though the universe has made a clerical error. Some players find this thematically perfect; Wonderland is supposed to betray you. Others find it unforgivable. You know which type of player you are.

And there is a balance issue. The Mad Hatter is strong. The Jabberwock is situational. Updated faction boards have been released to address this, which suggests the designers know and care. But the difference is visible.

Who is it for?

Players who want area control with a pulse. People who enjoy the particular torment of deciding whether to draw one more chip, knowing that the sensible move is to stop and the exciting move is to carry on, that these are not the same move, and that you are going to keep drawing anyway. Groups of three or four with two hours to spare and a fondness for conflict that manages to feel combative without being cruel.

Not for players who expect a reliable return on their strategic investments. Not for anyone who regards fifteen minutes of setup as an assault on human dignity. Not with five, unless everyone at the table has played before and knows what they are getting into.

Our final verdict

Wonderland’s War is a game about the gap between what you plan and what happens. It is a game about watching your careful calculations vanish down a rabbit hole. About the particular joy of drawing exactly the chip you needed, and the particular despair of the chip you did not. About a tea party that is also a negotiation, that is also a war, that is also, somehow, genuinely funny when it goes wrong.

It is not a game for everyone. It is a game for the people it is meant for, and those people will love it with the fierce, irrational loyalty of someone who keeps reaching into the bag.

A glorious mess, and it knows it.