Madcala Board Game Review

Steve Godfrey
May 4
7 min read

Madcala

WBG Score: 9

Player Count: 2

You’ll like this if you like: Mancala, Wonderlands War, Onitama

This is a review copy. See our review policy here

By Steve Godfrey

Madcala is a game based around a chaotic tea party in which people constantly move seats, rudeness is at its peak and garbled conversations are had over copious amounts of tea. I can’t believe they’ve finally made a game about our family gatherings!

How to cause chaos at a tea party.

Set up by laying out the playmat. Yep, you read that right, you get a playmat with this game. Give each player a colour of shard, either pink or black and have them place two shards of their colour on each plate on their side of the mat and place their larger doubler shard on their home plate. Each player then takes a character and places their card and plus ones on their side. Then take any tokens that their characters or plus ones use. Players take a hit point disc and set it to the max. Then flip the coin and have someone call it to pick the first player.

On your turn you take a mandatory action by moving shards on your side of the mat. Pick one plate on your side of the mat and take all the shards from that plate and going clockwise add one shard to every plate, skipping your opponents home plate, until you have one shard left to place. When you put that last shard down you then take the action of that plate, regardless of which side of the mat it's on. The actions are, Hit your opponent for two damage, add two shards from your supply to your home plate, heal one damage and hit for two, draw a commoner card and finally, heal a damage or refresh a plus one card.

You can, on your turn, play commoner cards as a free action. These will have a number of different actions on them, including giving you more shards, letting you rearrange them or even just doing damage. You also have the option of using your characters ‘plus one cards’ Each character has three plus one cards that have their own special abilities. Each one has a shard cost which you pay by taking your shards from the mat. Perform the cards ability and flipping the card over. It can only be played again once you've taken the refresh action on the mat. Some plus one cards are not refreshable. Instead these have a limited number of uses and once they’re used then the card is done. The game will end when one player has no hit points left and their opponent wins.

“Begin at the beginning…..

Did you ever watch Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (not, not the rubbish ones, the animated one) and think how much fun and chaotic it'd be to be at that tea party? But then also realise how frustrating it’d be because you'd never actually get a cup of tea. Well that's pretty much what a game of Madcala can be. It’s fun, chaotic and I never get a cup of tea…but I cant really blame that last thing on the game. Madcala is based unsurprisingly off of the game Mancala. Which I'll be honest, I just thought it was the name of a mechanism and didn’t realise it was the name of the actual game! In my defence it’s only been around a few thousand years so I’ve not really had time to catch up with it.

Madcala is one of those games where you can almost see the escalation of the design process. You can see where the designers went from “ok, wouldn’t it be cool if we took Mancala and added a battle mechanic to it” then there was a decision to add the commoner cards then someone suggested the characters and the asymmetry. What I'm saying is that it’s a game with layers. Now normally this would include some kind of onion reference but since it’s a tea party I’m gonna go with a layer cake (feel free to imagine your preferred flavours.) Each layer adds another, well, layer of strategy to the game.

Like any good strategy game it encourages you to think about the bigger picture rather than just your current turn. In fact, paying attention to what your opponent can do could be even more key because you could be literally giving them the tools to do either exactly what they want or something better. I can't tell you how many times I’ve moved shards round to my opponents side of the board only to hear them say “that’s actually helped me!” Yeah, I’m not great at this game.

Sacrifice is the name of the game here and you’ll be sacrificing your shards a lot. It feels almost wrong voluntarily handing your pieces over to your opponents side and potentially giving them the opportunity to do negative actions against you. But I love that this could equally be a way to stop them doing those actions against you. Just adding one shard to one of their plates could be the thing that foils their plans. Where this exchange hurts the most though is when you hand over your doubler. It's the chess equivalent of lending your opponent your Queen for a few turns, being offended when they attack you with it and then feeling reluctant to take back the treacherous so and so. That is of course WHEN they decide to give it back. Because let's be honest, there's nothing like holding your opponent's most powerful piece hostage. Trust me, there's no amount of Liam Neeson style threats that's gonna get that back any quicker. Especially not when your opponent hasn’t seen Taken and has no idea what you're talking about. On the flip side of course you get the satisfaction of hoarding and using your opponents shards so it does balance out.

“It’s always tea time”

Each character has a mix of fun abilities each with their own unique style of play which fits their character. The Cheshire Cat for example has a madness die in place of their doubler which dictates the action of the space it lands on. The Mad Hatter has a one time ability to completely reset the board to factory settings and the Queen of Hearts is all about using commoners to manipulate her action token. Don’t worry though, I’m sure that no commoners were hurt in the playing of this game. The characters are where the true theme of the game comes to life.

There’s certainly a difficulty curve to them and I’d definitely recommend someone taking Alice as the more beginner friendly. It’s not necessarily difficult in how their abilities work, but more in how to use them to the best effectiveness. By no means is that a negative though, in fact it’s a massive positive in terms of replayability. Now you can spend some games experimenting with a character and with games only lasting around half an hour tops it’s not unheard of to play at least a couple of games back to back. It gives you so much chance to really explore the characters.

With so many different and seemingly crazy abilities, balancing is always going to be a concern. I can only speak to that a little bit. I’ve played a lot of the characters but I've not played a lot of the many possible combinations but I concede that there may be a combination out there that aren't exactly equally matched. I suppose that given the cast of characters you could argue that any unbalancing could even be thematic? Regardless, it's never really bothered us. Games tend to last less than half an hour so if we do ever find a dud combination it's not too much trouble to rack it up and play again without ruining our enjoyment. A game like this tends to reward repeat plays and gaining experience. So what may feel unbalanced on the first run may start to even out with more experimenting.

The commoner cards are like the last minute seasoning on your steak….although you should really be seasoning your steak before you cook it. I suppose thematically I should have found a way to shuck some oysters into this review rather than a steak. Maybe I’ll find a way to throw a pearl or two in later on. Back to the cards! They give you just enough to add that touch extra to your turns. A sprinkling of extra damage here, a dusting of shard movement there and a drizzling of opponent manipulations (I really shouldn’t write these things on an empty stomach) and they can be enough to give your turn that little extra punch, quite literally.

Why IS a raven like a writing desk?

We’ve found that games of Madcala don’t tend to outstay their welcome and I think that's because the game is designed to avoid games from dragging on simply because damage will generally be whittled down faster than you can heal it back.

On the subject of health, this is a weird little “fix” we’ve put in place for something that probably 95% of people won't even care about. We always play with our health dials face down. It seems almost silly, but for us it really ups the tension in our games since neither of us know how close the other player is to zero health. If we have them face up you can kinda see if you’re gonna win a turn or two beforehand and it makes it a bit anticlimactic in our opinion. Not a knock on the game but a little house rule that we found makes it more fun.

We’ve gotta talk about Manny Tremblays art right? This is my first foray into Druid City Games, Wonderful Wonderland World and even though I've seen the art for these games from afar, it's not until you get it close up that you see just how truly great it is. Forget putting this on my wall, I’d consider getting a piece of this as a tattoo. Whether or not you consider the theme and mechanisms as a good match the art fully brings you into the world. The only issue is that you may have to nudge your opponent for their turn because they're too busy staring at the art.

….”and go on until you come to the end”…

Madcala became an instant hit for me and my daughter. The clever abstract play, the fun player powers and the brilliant thematic touches has made this one of our favourite two player games. Now I just need to figure out a way to win a game or two!

Right I’m off to carry on chasing this white rabbit. So far it’s quite content to just hop around the garden. At this rate I’ll never get to wonderland. I’m beginning to think that this is just a normal rabbit.

….”then stop”.