“The looking glass has shattered and war has come to Wonderland!”
Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/227935/wonderlands-war
Playing Time: 45-125 Minutes
Weight: Medium
Genre: Territorial Control & Bag Building
Designer: Tim Eisner, Ben Eisner, Ian Moss
Players: 2-5
The first thing you notice about Wonderland’s War is the aesthetic. It’s an absolutely gorgeous, beautiful take on Alice and her fantasyland that is somehow whimsical and hauntingly dark. The board is beautiful, as are the components.
But there’s a lot of game in here too. The game is played over three rounds, each broken into a tea party phase and a war phase. During the tea party, players will take turns taking cards which let them deploy followers on the world map and add new chips to their bag.
During the war phase, each territory’s control is resolved. In each one, participating players pull tokens out of their bag and raises the strength of their attack by the token pulled, with some tokens having multiplier effects or other modifiers that keep things interesting. But there’s a press-your-luck element: pulling a madness token will kill one of your followers, and if all of your followers succumb to madness, you are defeated.
Wonderland’s War is one of the most impressive new-to-me games of the year. An absolutely gorgeous production. A territorial control game that plays so much faster and lighter than a full-on wargame. A ton of variability of units inside the box. This game has the juice.
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