Wonderland's War | Just really, really fun | Board Game Review

[Music] hi everyone and welcome to another thinker theme a board game review i'm amy all about the mechanics this is my partner maggie who's all about the theme today we are reviewing wonderland's war by druid city games and the designers are tim eisner ben eisner and ian moss so let's get into this giant giant box yes so in wonderland's war we are in wonderland and apparently the looking glass has shattered and madness has escaped and so now it's actually quite a tame normal sort of place and we can't have that like that that's not allowed and so what we're going to be doing is all of the different characters from one wonderland are going to have their own faction and will be able to quite literally fight in battles in between tea parties to restore wonderland to their favorite version of what it used to be now each game of wonderland's war has three rounds and at the beginning of each round we are going to sit down for a cuppa we're gonna have a cup of tea at the tea party which is in the center of the board and this part of the game is the card drafting phase of the game and you're going to be moving your um character around this lovely uh tea party table and you're going to be able to stop and draft one of these cards on these cards are a range of bonuses that are going to help you with the battle ahead now that could be in the form of adding some different chips of higher value to your little bag or ones that have uh great powers that are going to help you in the battle or it might be to recruit a wonderlandian a character that can help you in the battle ahead as well and on the corner of most of the cards there is also a little meeple figure that has a number in the center of it that's going to be the number of supporters or from your faction that you're going to be able to put into one of the areas around the board now if you look around the outside of the board you can see that there's five different zones at the end of the tea party phase we are going to be having a battle in each of those zones depending on where you've placed your supporters now the reason why you want to have presence in each of these areas is that the more that you can build up here the more opportunity you're going to have to win this area in the battle because each one of these little supporters is going to act as a life if you will or really one last opportunity to stay in the game because as the battle commences which i'll talk through in a minute you're going to be removing them one by one and you really need to hang in there for as long as possible versus your opponents so now let's come back to the bag building components you all have a little bag that represents your faction at the beginning of the game it's going to have some faction chips that are really only one and two and three level of value but you're also gonna have what's called these madness chips the madness chips are the bad chips you do not want to be drawing those out of your bag for the most part because they are going to be what means that you lose representation in these battles or lives if you will but through the tea party and the card drafting some of these cards are going to allow you to put some of these powerful chips into your bag so what we're doing is we're trying to dilute the madness in our bag by putting in higher valued chips however if you're not careful some of the cards that are really powerful that you can draft from the center give you these shards and shards are also bad because if you have the most shards before the battle begins you're going to be attracting more madness tokens which again is going to offset all of that beautiful dilution that you've done during the tea party phase so the way that the battle would work here in the meadow of living flowers is we would look at who has the who has any supporters in this area or their leader because at the end of the tea party you actually get the opportunity to take your leader and place it in an area of your choosing at the beginning of the game the leader has a strength of one but you're able to increase that as the game goes on so what we would do is we would first look at the amount of starting strength that each player has in that area in this case maggie only has supporters no leader no wonderlandians working for her on her side and so she has nothing to begin with because these supporters are worth zero my lead is currently worth one so we start the battle with amy on one and maggie unfortunately on zero now the way that the battle works is we're going to be drawing chips out of our bags and we're going to be adding them to the top of our player board where it says active chips for everything that we draw out of our bags we're going to be revealing simultaneously i just drew a three which means that mine is going to move up by three and maggie also drew a three so maggie is going to move up by three and so on and so forth now what i don't want to be doing is drawing these madness tokens from me about that me bag [Laughter] oh of course madness to continue back now what i don't want to be doing is drawing these madness [Laughter] now what neither maggie nor i want to be doing is drawing these madness tokens out of our bag these madness tokens are going to mean that you're going to lose at least one of your representatives out of the zone and when you've lost everyone from the area it means that you've gone bust and you can no longer be considered to win um this bat this particular battle in this case if i had lost everyone in the battle then my marker would go down to zero on the battle track and maggie would automatically win because she would be the last person still active in this particular battle another way that the battle can end is if anyone reaches the 25 no matter how many people are still left active in the battle if someone reaches 25 they instantly win when you win you can get the points or victory points that are tracked around the outside of the board according to which round we're in and second player will get half of the points allocated to that particular round and if you do win the battle in the area you get to place one of your little castles and that castle is going to give you more strength or more beginning strength two points of strength at the beginning of each new battle in the next round at any point in the battle you can also choose to opt out of drawing any more chips from your bag and stay put and if you manage to be the person who's left in the lead when everybody else goes bust then that might be a great strategy to win being a little bit more conservative so essentially in each battle you are drawing out as many chips as you can as many as you feel confident to keep drawing hoping that you're not going to pull out these madness chips as your madness chips get placed on your board the fourth one is going to mean that all of the madness chips go back into your bag as well as all of your exhausted chips from battle's past and that part is actually really interesting in this game because as you go throughout this game you have a shield that can protect you from one madness chip which is really really useful you also are going to be using your chips throughout each of these battles and moving them down into the exhausted chip space if you don't pull out four madness chips you're not going to be able to get those chips back so the ones that you use in this zone are now no longer available to you in the next zone and the risk of pulling out the madness chips that you haven't pulled is getting more and more and the pressure is really on so sometimes it can actually be good to bust because you're going to get all of your powerful chips back into your bag and it's the time when your shield restores as well now i won't go into all of the individual powers of each of the different chips that you can recruit into your bag um but suffice to say that they all give you some kind of special power for example if you pull out one it might double the effect of the next chip that you pull out and so on and so forth um which can be really exciting and adds like a little bit of um kind of like variability and intrigue into what you're pulling out and also it's exciting to be able to put those into your bag to build it up to be something really powerful on your player board i will just add that you can unlock some asymmetric player abilities and also there's a forging action which allows you to get some benefits unlock some more supporters and be adding these more powerful three-point chips into your bag but now let's talk about more of the nuance and what we thought of the game oh well the first thing that i will say about this game is how beautiful it is and how much the aesthetic just hit me right in the face as soon as we got the box delivered and we just kind of opened that up so like the box itself obviously it's beautiful every component is beautiful and we do have the deluxe we have the deluxe solution and we also um have the if you haven't noticed already the premium chips as well yeah so in the base there's it's all just those are cardboard they're still really really beautiful so the actual graphic design and the illustrations is a it's a an aesthetic that i really i'm attracted to i really find it super appealing so so with the deluxe version my goodness all the minis are amazing um the quality of the chips the chips them themselves the chips are beautiful and they come in a beautiful box as well and while you grab that maggie i might talk about the minis because the minis are wonderfully detailed they're all your favorite characters from alice in wonderland and it pained me actually to demo this without painting them because this these miniatures have made me excited about winter which i love summer but i'm excited to sit down and paint because it's a winter activity but it's just really nice you know to have these characters that you know and love as well as the artwork for inspiration and they're really beautifully detailed as well but like this this box amazing it's got a magnetic um what do you call that like a magnetic seal yep and look at that open that up everything has its place it has a beautiful diagram at the top that explained where everything goes so when we were unpacking it it's really cool but the best thing about this is that in the box itself they actually allowed space for that to sit inside the main box um which is excellent because it is a very wide box but if you have the premium chips um yeah they will fit nicely in there um and it has like that real tactile experience because absolutely because the core part of the game is bag building when you reach in and off often i've said to the players around the table can everyone stop like doing the like clicky thing because everyone has their hands in their bag like even when you're not doing anything it's got nothing to do with the battle everyone just they feel so nice and the way they're printed is really beautiful they have a little shine to them yeah um so this is one of the most beautiful and deluxe games that i think we've ever purchased it was expensive to get those premium chips but because they're so important to the game yeah if you have the opportunity to get them would highly recommend it so table presence wow 100 you know 100 all of the points all of the everything all of the heart emojis it's it's amazing um in terms of the actual gameplay um i found i really i'm not usually one for uh push your luck because yeah i tend to prefer the low luck game so things like you know quacks of quendlenberg i enjoy but it it has a very um what do you call it like an expiry date for me like in terms of like the amount of time that i can play them and yeah the the occasion and what's interesting is that we've played quacks of course but we've never felt compelled to own it yeah and you know i'm going to put out this out there straight away in this review i feel compelled to own this absolutely yes the reason being is that it it provides i think the if you like the fun of that idea of push your luck with a bit more strategy yes um one thing i like about this is when you first start to play it feels like you're just looking at these individual battles and you're just hoping to win and the push your luck element is really strong if you are introducing a new gamer to this game then that's what they can just focus on they can focus on do i or do i not want to pull another token out of this bag i'll chip out of this bag and push my luck but if you're a seasoned gamer there's plenty here to be thinking about because when you are placing out your supporters to begin with you're really thinking about do i go all in on a couple of areas or do i stretch myself really thin and be a part of more battles so that's one element that you're thinking about that kind of almost area majority type game the other thing is the amount of risk that you're willing to take on with these shards so do you like pull all of these cars that are the most powerful but therefore risk having more of these um chips in your bag which could be problematic in the battle and the the final thing that i think is really subtle and not immediately evident when you know you when i read the rule book and i was thinking about this game but it's the way that the battles cascade because you know that you've got a number of battles this first battle if you're using all of your most powerful chips yeah and you're winning the battle you survive the battle that has implications for the next battle because you haven't gone through that exhaust kind of process those are exhausted and you can't yeah they won't be in the back they haven't your bag hasn't been refreshed and so it's actually quite difficult to win battle after battle after battle something's got to give yeah and in some ways you need to go through that bust process yeah and then it becomes well where do i want to bust because the points are worth different like each area you don't even have to bust so that's the other thing it's like that there's the other element is which areas do you even want to contest because as you see they have different points depending on the round so sometimes it'll be really bad at the start of like for the first round or two but it's like it's so powerful by the end so is it something where i want to get an early position in that area and kind of just or if it's you know fairly strong all the way through like that's something that i'm going to want to battle every round or so that's one one level of it the other thing is we haven't even talked about these quest cards so you have these amazing quest cards that add a whole other dimension to the game where all of a sudden it's potentially not necessarily all about winning as much as you can they have the quests are often about make sure that you end um with this number of active um chips uh in this what you're battling in this particular region or make sure that if you're battling in this particular region that you end on a forge symbol or so they give you sort of those unique things that that means that you actually may not even want to win that battle can i just say i don't think i have once opted out of a battle to win an objective and i never win this game so maggie has a point maggie does win this game a lot and it is sometimes not about winning the battle even though it's so tempting winning the war ultimately even though it's so tempting and i'm always trying to win each battle but the other thing i really like about this game is that sometimes you can go to an area and nobody's contesting you oh yeah and if that happened you're instantly going to get the points which means that if maggie sees that i'm going to get some easy points she'll probably throw a supporter in there as well just to make sure that because there's second place yeah it means that you can actually go into a battle with one other person and then kind of just um draw maybe one chip and then hold yeah and it means that you're going to get those second player points and not just give the other person an easy run without having to draw any chips out of their bags so i really like that dynamic as well yeah the cards that you draft at the start of each round and the tea party they escalate so there's a different deck for each of the different rounds and i really like the options that they give you because um there is that tension between one-off bonuses and things that are going you know giving you new objective cards um versus getting those powerful chips and it always feels like a tension between uh avoiding the shards and doing some of the lesser kind of bonuses and really building up this powerful bag of chips which may or may not win you the game last time i found like i had a really powerful bag of cool stuff and maggie still won because of the objective cards and the other thing that i really enjoy is there's so much replayability in this because obviously yes you have all the different battles but even the the power of the ability of the individual chips can change depending on which side of or which option you use and they've got from a through to d so there's quite and they they really vary in terms of how benevolent or how like mean or tough these this the abilities are going to be even to yourself so so there might be um instances where um with um i think it was with the with the red rook you actually will get penalized if you end up pulling out multiple red rooks in the same as part of the same battle or if you're always that risk and reward yeah even comes into the composition of your own bag as well i really like that they were thoughtful enough to include these reference cards for each player because it makes it really easy to in subsequent games change the power of these simply by asking people to turn over their reference card and now refer to this you don't have to use the cards that they've um got there that explain the powers yeah i say another i'm sorry oh no i was just going to add the wonderlandians as well because there's so many that come with this game they you know the deluxe edition they each have their own little mini and when you recruit them they give you additional power in um any area that you'd like to have them in for as long as they're alive and on your team but sometimes they also give you bonus chips as well and those chips often have quite an interactive effect on the other players so some chips might mean that your opponent's next chip is worth nothing and that type of thing so they're fun to recruit yeah i also like with this game is that you can it is the kind of game where you can go let me try this particular strategy because at the start you know what the abilities are going to be of the different the different chips and um yeah and so for example there was one game where i was like well i want to go really quest strong i tend to really enjoy the game anyway and one of the abilities of one of the um with that particular side was that with the roses if you ended up having i believe it's like more than two i'm active by the end of a battle even if you didn't win the battle then you got to complete one of the the quest like an additional quest without actually having to meet the condition so it's like all those things and even with the quest cards they can be really powerful because not only do they have the top quest they usually also have an end game a kind of additional points condition and then if you manage to do both of them you get additional points for you know doing the combo so so i just love the the variety and all the options that this gives me as a heavy game as a heavier gamer or something that enjoys more like layers of strategy yeah yeah if you can't tell already that is why we're a bit gushy about this game is because it has something for everyone it really is an easy enough game to teach for a relatively new gamer for someone like maggie or someone like me it has you know for me that interactive battle element for maggie that i'm gonna be over here achieving my quest and just doing my own thing as usual yeah and winning um and then the other thing i really like about this is no one's left out because when there's a battle and you don't have any presence in that battle instead of just sitting back and like watching people do their thing while they draw things out of their bag you get to make a wager on who's going to win that battle and that keeps everybody engaged throughout the whole process throughout the whole round and i really enjoy that if you win the wager you get to add a token into your bag if you lose the wager you're going to take one of these shards which brings you closer to madness and it's just like a fun way to keep everyone engaged around the table but it's hard to describe how it feels to play this game i think if you take the fun of quacks and then you kind of explode that out into a bigger experience yeah the simultaneous reveal and the battle still has that real fun element and i wish i had an adjective that was better than fun but that is like there's a lot of laughter around it when you go bust and it's like of course a lot of the light there's a lot of moments of like surprising the light throughout yes there's still a bit of luck of course because you're drawing out of a bag and sometimes you've got 30 things in here and you pull out the one madness that's the double madness token and that's super annoying um but it's also really funny because yeah what are the odds and it is really annoying and that's kind of what you need to go into this game expecting it to be and if you go into this game expecting it to be that then you're going to have fun you're going to have a really great time i think this is a really cool game and um one game uh that it what i love about it is that it has this table presence and it's going to be annoying to set up for just a couple of people yeah let's put that out there yeah yeah yeah yeah you do want it for the higher yeah it does count it doesn't have a solo mode um and the two player makes a few adjustments to make the board um a little tighter changes a couple of the rules but for the most part we enjoyed it most at a higher play account and when you've got a group of people who um just you know you want to have this like full board game experience but it's not too heavy yeah and we often played it late at night so like when you you know you've played other things you don't necessarily have a lot of brain power and and so it's like you still you have that because it's like you know largely that push your luck you do have a little bit of that strategy but it's not like uber super taxing and like oh i've you know got analysis paralysis or anything like that it actually felt really um energizing energizing and i found that after a game i wanted to play it again and i can't think of higher praise than that because we play a lot of games and this one really has staying power yeah it takes you know what we love about you know the funness of quacks and it brings it into a board gaming realm that we really enjoy for when we have a group a bigger group of people around the table yeah um yeah so that is everything about um this wonderful game wonderland's war we did go all in on the kickstarter and this is one that i do not regret backing at all especially at that deluxe level if this does sound like a game for you i would encourage you to try try and get all of those little goodies they really do add to the experience if you enjoyed this review please hit like subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and we'll be back with more board game reviews soon but otherwise bye for now [Music]

Channel: ThinkerThemer

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Keywords: board games, board game reviews, board game mechanics, tabletop games, tabletop game reviews, board game themes, thinker themer, thinkerthemer, top 10, boardgames, boardgame, top 10 boardgames, wonderland's war, wonderlands war how to play, wonderlands war review, wonderland's war board game, wonderlands war board game, review, reviews, board game review, wonderlands war board game review, wonderlands war kickstarter

Id: pKJilPt4Sdw

Length: 23min 7sec (1387 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 23 2022