Debrief: Madcala- A Wonderland's War Game by Druid City Games

A duel at a Wonderland tea table shouldn’t feel this sharp—but Madcala turns classic Mancala into a fast, tactical fight that rewards nerve and clean planning. We sit down with this two-player brawler from Druid City Games and unpack why the lighter weight, tight turns, and gorgeous production make it so easy to teach yet surprisingly tense to master. From stitched neoprene to plastic shards and a chunky doubler, the table presence invites you in; the shard economy and plate effects keep you counting backward from game-winning landings.

We break down how the guests—Alice, the Red Queen, the Hatter, the Jabberwock, and more—change the flow with flavorful plus-one abilities, and how commoner cards layer in burst turns, extra moves, and clever denial. If you love the vibe and art of Wonderland’s War but want a head-to-head that runs 15–30 minutes, this is your lane. The rhythm feels like Dice Throne in spirit—public info, character kits, incremental damage—but here your “dice” are routes, counts, and the perfect moment to drop your doubler for a swing that flips the scoreboard. We also share why aggression beats drift, how to keep shard access on your side, and what makes the Red Queen’s theft and the Hatter’s reset so satisfying.

There’s real replay packed into a small footprint, and the organizer practically winks at future expansions—Caterpillar’s cocoon-and-flip already hints at playful twists to come. If you’ve slept on Mancala as a modern mechanism, this might be the nudge that changes your mind. Hit play for strategy tips, character highlights, and honest thoughts on who will love Mad Cala and who should pass. If you enjoy what you hear, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs a new two-player go-to, and drop a review so more gamers can find us.

Chapters

• 0:00 Warm-Up & Health Check
• 0:20 Introducing Mad Cala
• 1:35 Production, Price, and Components
• 3:08 Core Loop: Mancala Combat
• 6:12 Setup, Guests, and Plus Ones
• 8:21 Pace, Aggression, and Combos
• 11:26 Who It’s For (and Not)
• 13:20 Character Spotlights & Synergies
• 16:26 Shard Economy Explained

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:15

Welcome to the Operation Game Night Podcast, back at Better Than Ever. Today we are talking Mad Cala, the next installment in the Wonderland's War series by Druid City Games. Joining me as always, the Mad Hatter himself, Clayton Gable. How are you doing, Clay?

SPEAKER_01: 0:33

I am doing awesome as usual, Travis. It is good to be here with you. You sound a little better than last week. How are you feeling? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 0:42

Well, I hope that I sound better because I felt terrible last week. I sounded terrible. Listening back to those episodes just made me cringe. So I hope that I'm sounding better for the listener. I hope that I am uh looking better for those that are watching on YouTube. Uh, but yeah, you always look good, man. I'm glad to be here. I'm stoked to talk about this game.

SPEAKER_01: 1:04

Well, let's hear it. Let's hear it. Um don't don't delay anymore.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08

I've been excited to hear about this. So Mad Calla is the next installment in the Wonderland's War series. It says right there on the box, a Wonderland Wars game. If you are going into this game thinking that it's going to be just like Wonderland's War, same level of weight, same level of playtime, same level of involvement. Uh, you are sorely mistaken. This is a much lighter game in the Wonderland's War franchise. Uh, Druid City Games always does it great. The production is amazing. Uh, the art is amazing. Uh the artist is Manny Tremblay. I'm not sure if he did the uh the other one as well. He did, yeah. Anyways, it it all looks phenomenal. It's it's well produced, and this came to Kickstarter maybe a year and a half ago, and uh there was no super deluxified versions. Uh you bought the game for what 35 bucks on Kickstarter, and it came with everything as is. The only thing that you could pay additionally on the Kickstarter was for a small expansion pack that had uh the Caterpillar and Tweedledee and Tweedledum as playable characters, and it was like five bucks. It comes with a bunch of cars and a couple of tokens like you would see in Wonderland's war. Uh, but that was the only way to upgrade your purchase. And for 35 bucks, you got a killer production. It's got the nice like um neoprene stitched mat that comes with it just in the base level game. It comes with nice uh plastic tokens, it comes with the plastic shards. I will say the plastic shards in Wonderland's War are far more satisfying than this one. These ones feel a little lighter, they're not quite as like dense, uh, but the production is still good. And uh from the box size and the uh 3D printed uh organizer that's in the box, I have to think that they are putting out a ton more for this game. And I'll tell you why. Uh so Mad Calla is a game where they it's kind of like it's kind of like uh dice throne, where you are trying to whittle down the other player's health to zero. How you do that is through man calla actions where you pick up stones, these shards off of a plate on the on the T table, the T setting, and you move them around man call style. So completely different mechanisms from what you would find in Wonderland's war. The similarities are all your favorite characters and playable characters are here, plus a couple extra from Wonderland's war. You can play as the Red Queen, you can play as Alice, you can play as Jabberwalk, you can play as uh the Mad Hatter and uh the Cheshire Cat. All those people are still here, and they all have their own unique player abilities. Um, setup super easy. You grab your player card, other person grabs their player card, and then each of those uh player, the characters that you're playing as come with plus ones that are designated for those characters. So Alice will always bring a couple of plus ones. Um the red queen has that her designated plus ones, which are like a set of cards or whatever. Um they're like playing cards, anthropomorphized uh playing cards that are on cards that you played your mat. If that makes sense. That's a lot of words to say. You lay these cards down that are associated with your character, they each have individual special abilities. Some might have unique setups. You set your player wheel to 25 health, then you add two shards to each of the plates, and then you have this big boy shard that's like twice the size as the others. That is your doubler shard, and you place that on your home plate, your home mat, your home station, and then you're ready to play. Uh, on your turn, you have three actions, uh, one of which is mandatory, which is move shards around this table man called style from your side of the board. And your other two actions are your plus one actions, which are optional, and your commoner actions. Commoners are a big stack of extra characters and items and stuff, a lot of which you saw in Wonderland's War, but they are in this deck that's face down off the side of the board. Uh, you might collect them throughout the game to get additional bonuses that you can play later on. Um and that's what you do. Each of the spaces on the plates, each plate has its own like special ability that will trigger when you place your last stone on that plate. If you land your doubler on that plate, that special ability for that plate activates twice. So if I land on the space that has the two damage icons and one health with my doubler, I will do four damage and heal myself twice. So, really, it's a game of like counting plates as they move around and all these shard shift. Um only played this a couple times, only seen a couple of the characters. Uh, but like I played the first time I played it as the Mad Hatter. And the Mad Hatter, his special ability is once per game, I can just reset the board to like the starting uh the starting setup where each plate has two different shards, my doublers at my home plate. Uh, and then you just start from there, which it feels kind of piddly at the time, but those shards start moving around, and you have like tons and tons of shards. Everybody has like two per plate plus a bunch off to the side in the reserve, and through different actions, you can add shards to plates, you can pull shards off, you can make your opponent pull shards off. Um, and really, this I I don't know the best strategy for this game. I haven't quite figured it out yet, but I feel like it's a lot of counting shards and trying to activate the right powers at the right time to get an advantage. Uh, play time for this one, it says that it plays 15 to 30 minutes much faster if people are being aggressive, much, much longer if people are playing passively. So uh Rachel and I played this. It's a great two-player game. It's nice and light. Uh the first couple rounds, I'm like, nothing is happening because I would damage her, she'd heal. She would damage me, I'd heal. And we kind of go back and forth until somebody starts taking big swings and really goes in for those the attacks and pairs it with commoner cards that do additional damage and does all this stuff. Um, so yeah, it's a pretty simple game. It's much lighter than you would get in Wonderland's War. It's a different uh mechanic altogether. You're playing mancala to do the damage. Uh, it it really does feel like that dice throne kind of scenario to me where you're trying to like you have the information, you're trying to make the best decisions you can at the moment you have. Um, but it does feel to me, it felt like what uh dice thrown because you're trying to whittle down their health over time versus like trying to control areas and trying to control which like the bag building and stuff that you find on Wonderland's War. So this won't be for all fans of Wonderland, Wonderland's War. If you hate the mancolla mechanic, this won't be for you. Uh, but I found it pretty interesting, and I think a lot of the character cards are have a lot of character to them and bring a lot of flavor to the game that uh might have been missing in Wonderland's War in a lot of cases. The plus one cards are really thematic and cool. Uh Rachel played a game as the Red Queen, and every time I played a commoner, she could pay a couple of shards off of her plates, she'd pull them off, put them in back into her reserves, and then she'd take that car commoner card and slide it underneath the red queen. And during her turn, she could discard one of those commoners to do uh either damage or health. And this her like little player token had a damage icon and a health icon, and she would flip it back and forth so she could continue to just like throw these commoners at problems to either heal her or damage me. And so she was like really hard to whittle down that health over time because she kept having that ability to burn my commoners against me. So uh yeah, super interesting interactions between the different characters. I would love to get all of the characters played to see how they differ. Um, all of them start with 25 health, except for those in the expansion, like the caterpillar, he starts at like 15 health and he can go up from there, but then like once uh was it like once he dies or something, he comes back as like a butterfly. So you flip his card, you get five additional health, and you run it again. So uh yeah, so kind of interesting character dynamics that go back and forth, interesting player powers. Um, I haven't played mancala probably since I was in fifth grade, so it's kind of cool to get back to that mechanic.

SPEAKER_01: 10:12

Um so yeah, but yeah, the the closest thing, yeah, yeah. The closest thing I've played to Mankala since like third grade is five tribes, and I think that is probably a little more freewheeling in terms of how you can pick up and drop things, maybe a little more complicated than it sounds like this is. Can you explain like the shard economy a little more?

SPEAKER_00: 10:39

Start on your plates, you will remove them to activate your plus one powers. Uh, most of them will have you remove shards from your player plates, and so those shards become valuable because you can only move uh you can only grab shards from a plate that is on your side of the table that has your shard in it. So I can't just grab from anywhere. So keeping my shards on my side of the plate does matter to me, and I think that's where it matters, is like I'm just I want my options open at all times, and so the more shards that I can put down onto the table, the better off I'm gonna be in the long run.

SPEAKER_01: 11:18

And so I didn't I didn't catch that you had separate shard colors, yes, okay, yeah. That's interesting, and is it just it's just like man call like if you have a pot of four shards in one little plate, you pick up four and then you drop in sequential plating order all the way around.

SPEAKER_00: 11:39

Yep, and you are always moving clockwise around the table, but you can pick which of the shards that you drop on each of the subsequent plates. And so the only hard rule there is when I move those shards, if I pick up a doubler, the bigger shard, that one has to be put down last out of all of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If for some reason I end up with both mine and my opponent's doubler in my hand, I can decide which one I place down last. So there's a little bit of strategy there uh with the man call stuff. There's a little bit of strategy about uh when you put out your shards and the right time to activate those powers. Uh but yeah, I don't ask me about the correct yes, Clayton.

SPEAKER_01: 12:26

You probably mentioned this earlier, and I my brain didn't catch up to it until now. But does each shard you drop activate an ability or just the last one?

SPEAKER_00: 12:37

Only the last one that you end up on. Okay, so yeah, as I pick up, I'm kind of counting back from where I want to be. Yeah, to say, like, okay, I need health now. Okay, these two plates have health on them. Which one can I get to from shards that are on my side of the table? And it's like kind of planning backwards. I ended up uh with a um, I think I ended up with a commoner that allowed me to go twice. So I like took a move, added shards, then immediately was able to play again and get to the double damage uh token or the spot that I needed to to close the game out. But man, that you can uh get a lot of big combos in this one, uh, just based off playing the shards and your commoners and your plus one actions. Uh to me, the the most interesting thing about this is the plus one actions that kind of act as like your bonus abilities for your faction that you're playing as. Uh, and I've kind of been misnaming all of this stuff throughout this entire episode, but like the characters that you're playing it as are the guests, they are the guests at this tea party. So the Red Queen, Alice, Jabberwalk, all those guys are guests at the tea party, and then they bring their plus ones that give them additional player powers. Um, okay, and uh the the back of the book in true druid city fashion, uh they put a nice little kind of flow chart. You've got one mandatory action, which is move the shards, and then optional uh plus one actions and commoner actions, and then a nice icon gallery at the bottom, icon glossary that tells you what everything means. It's nice. I I put it in front of Rachel, but then you you have your individual player uh flowchart slash how to play reference cards, so everything's pretty simple, it's just a matter of understanding how the cards play together and how they play off of one another.

SPEAKER_01: 14:40

Man, you might be like one of the first people to play this game. I mean, if you look, there's not a lot about it on Board Game Geeks so far. It doesn't even have a weight rating yet. Uh, there's no images, so it's cool to hear about. This was obviously on my radar as Wonderland's War is one of our collective group's favorite games to get down and dirty with. And not least, I mean, I figured it's it did you know present itself as not Wonderland's War, you know, it is in the Wonderland's War universe, but it is not the same type of game, two-player only. But I was very intrigued because I did like the artwork and the whole vibe that they put together for Druid City, and there's not enough mancala games out there, I don't think. You know, nobody's oh yeah, you know, these other, you know, classic mechanisms are having renaissances here and there. And I think maybe Magcala could be the start of something for people getting clever with Mankala.

SPEAKER_00: 15:44

Yeah, I I think that you would really enjoy this one, Clay. It's it's light, it plays fast. The setup is super easy. If you have the cards already grouped by the guest and their plus ones, you literally shuffle shuffle a big deck of commoners, you hand somebody their pack of cards, being their guest and their plus ones, you set up the table real quick, and you're you're off to the races. Sets up quickly, it plays fast if people are being aggressive. Um, unique player powers, man. Like it has enough of the flavor of Wonderland's War, where it's like just the essence of Wonderland's War, right? Like Red Queen in Wonderland's War is just like flying through those additional uh support characters. And here she kind of does the same thing with the commoners. The second they get put down, she can pay to scoop them back up, put them underneath her, and then she's using them to deal damage and to heal herself. Um, yeah, I thought it was great. I I really enjoy this one. I enjoy the art, the production is great. I am really interested to see where they go with this one in the future, because on the expansion pack it says expansion pack number one, and that was the one that had caterpillar and Tweedledee, Tweedledum. And uh man, I'm trying to like scratch my head about what characters they could put on in this one still. And it seems like they have a plan going forward, otherwise, they would not have made this box as big because it's far larger than it needs to be for the amount of cards that are in there, and there's definitely room for expansions. There's like an entire row in the in the organizer that's just empty, and I don't know what goes there.

SPEAKER_01: 17:28

It's exciting to find out.

SPEAKER_00: 17:29

We'll see. We'll see. So hopefully they keep supporting this one and keep this one going because Druid City Games puts out phenomenal productions, and uh yeah, Mad Calla is no different. I really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_01: 17:42

Wow, thanks, Travis. I think we should probably quit this podcast because I feel like we just get on here and one of us plays a game and we gush about it, and then the other one's like, Yeah, I'm probably gonna have to buy that because that's um I'm feeling that way about Mad Calla. And I know I had you in your shopping cart last week with Hot Streak and and uh magical athlete showed up this week.

SPEAKER_00: 18:07

So yes, man, yeah, yeah, it's bad bad for wallets, but uh good for good for the hobby. Yeah, our mission objective is to play more board games, and this is how we do it, Clay. That's what we're doing. That's right. So, all right, did we do it? We did it. All right, this has been Operation Game Night talking about Mad Cala from Druid City Games. I have been Travis, he has been Clay. This has been another successful operation game night, and we're out of the way.