Hello! I’m Chris from the 5 Guys 1 Game podcast. Welcome to my 10 Ton Review of Wonderland’s War. This review applies only to the standard version of the game. There is a deluxe version…investigate that if you want.
Wonderland’s War is a fun and frantic delve into a war-ravaged version of Lewis Carroll’s beloved realm of Wonderland. The Looking Glass has shattered. Madness drains from the Wonderlandians. Battle is inevitable!
You will forge a formidable medley of bag building, card drafting and area majority to lead your iconic Wonderland character to victory. You will also need to manage your asymmetric character efficiently and push your luck just enough to secure glory!
I will be taking 10 general categories surrounding the world of board games, and I will mark the game out of 10 for each. This will give me an overall score out of 100. 10 Ton…clever right? Let’s get into it!
Artwork – 10
Let’s face it…if this game were a woman, I’d marry it! The artwork has a crisp, anime style that presents a darker edge to the world. It really suits the game and its theme. People look at this game from across the room and are drawn in by the explosion of colours. Iconography stands out as it should but also blends in with its surroundings beautifully. I cannot fault it, functionally or aesthetically.
Production – 8
In general, the production is great! The dice, the cards and the board are of a high standard. The meeples, castle minis and all the player components are nicely done, and they do their job well. The standees stand up, which is great! The game comes with a strange cardboard insert, which I was initially worried about, but it actually works really well.
My only complaint surrounds the inevitable clutter of the war phase. You will end up with multiple standees representing the armies of multiple players all bunched up in small areas. There is no way to quickly identify what belongs to who. Coloured standee bases for faction leaders would have helped.
Rulebook – 9
The rulebook does its job incredibly well. Everything is laid out in an order that makes sense. There are clear examples of most key elements of the game. The pages are colourful and uncluttered. And it isn’t overly big!
Mechanics and Interaction – 9
The game is split into two halves. During the tea party, you will be bag-building, drafting cards and enhancing your asymmetric faction, all in the interest of building up your army.
During the war phase you, well…you go to war! This is where you push your luck by pulling tokens from your bag in an effort to gain more battle strength than anyone else. If you do that, you get stuff. Like points! But if you bust…bad stuff happens.
Everything blends together seamlessly, and it all just makes sense thematically. You feel like you’re building an army as opposed to a bag. And the asymmetry is strong. Each faction leader is very different. The area majority during the war phase feels like a battle, and not just an exercise in having more tokens than anybody else.
Setup and Footprint – 7
Okay, the game loses some points here, but it’s still a good score! It’s big, but it isn’t overly big for what it is. It takes a bit of space with all the cards and chips, and you need quite a bit of stuff off to the side in case you need it. But it works fine. Big game, big board.
My issue is the setup (and take down). It takes a while! There are a lot of aspects to this game, and most are represented by a pile of game components. Then you have a similar set up list for each individual player and their respective pieces. I’m not marking it down too much because I think it’s all necessary for the game to work how it does, and I certainly can’t think of a better way of doing it. But the fact it it’s long!
Game Length – 7
Normally I’d keep setup and game length separate, but in this case the setup does tie into the game length score.
The game is quite long anyway. It takes 150-180 minutes to play at full player count, in my experience. This isn’t too bad, as it’s supposed to be meaty, but for some I have played with it’s just a drop too long. The issue is, when you factor in the setup to the game length, you end up with a game that doesn’t get to the table as often as it deserves. Wonderland’s War feels like a fun, fast-paced medium-weight game when you’re playing it. The total length of time needed to play it can make it feel like a heavy-weight.
Complexity – 9
They got this just about bang on. There are a lot of different paths you can take. Will you concentrate on building a brilliant bag? Will you complete as many quests as possible? Will you just make your leader harder than a coffin nail? Perhaps a nifty combination of them all?
The choices you can make, combined with the cocktail of mechanisms makes the game satisfyingly complex. Yet none of the individual elements are difficult to grasp. It feels like you really need to think about your strategy, but the task never seems unmanageable.
Immersion – 9
This is not the kind of game where you have a little look at your phone between turns.
The tea party is an ever-changing storm of enticing cards, battle-planning and the omnipresent risk of someone stealing the stuff you wanted so screw them!
The war phase is a must-watch for everyone around the table. Even the players not involved in the current battle can bet on who will win!
Replayability – 9
There are multiple different types of chips you can get to build up your bag, and the game comes with four different powers for each chip. This adds so much variability.
There are also five different factions to try and a bunch of special Wonderlandian cards that can be added to your army. Every game of Wonderland’s War can be played differently, and it’s not the sort of game you get out every week, so the possibilities are almost endless!
Availability and Value – 6
The game needs to take a hit here. It is never available…can’t say it more clearly than that. It’s currently rarer than hen’s teeth, and if you find a copy on the secondary market, you’re going to pay a lot for it.
It’s 100% worth the RRP of between £60 and £70 in my opinion, but you will, unfortunately, struggle to find it at the time of writing this.
Summary
So, Wonderland’s War scores a magnificent 83 out of 100. That’s impressive! The game has a great weight to it, plenty of meat on its bones and a myriad of branching pathways to explore on your quest for victory. Yet it is very easy to teach and simple enough to grasp.
The combination of mechanics added to the sublime artwork, fantastic components and overwhelming theme all meld together in the box, and explode out of it as a truly amazing experience.
5 Guys 1 Game fully recommend Wonderland’s War.
