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When I first saw Madcala on the table, I expected something chaotic. Colorful gems, twisted Wonderland characters, glowing cats with creepy smiles, oversized tea-party artwork… it gives the impression that the game is going to spiral into nonsense after a few turns.
That’s not really what happens.
Underneath all the Wonderland weirdness sits a surprisingly calculated two-player strategy game built around mancala-style movement. You pick up shards from one space, move them clockwise around the table, and trigger the effect where the final shard lands. Simple enough. The interesting part is how quickly that tiny rules system turns into a puzzle where every move affects the next few turns.
That was the biggest surprise during our first plays. The game looks chaotic at first, but after a while we completely stopped looking at the artwork and started staring at the board like two people trying to calculate taxes in Wonderland.
The whole thing takes place around this surreal tea-party table filled with guests, strange helpers, magical shards, and cards that slightly bend the rules. Every player chooses their own character with unique abilities and special cards, so there’s asymmetry from the start. Some guests push toward aggressive play, others feel more technical, and some just seem designed to annoy your opponent as efficiently as possible.
The easiest way to describe Madcala is probably this: it looks like a fantasy duel, but it plays much closer to an abstract strategy game with powers layered on top. Whether that sounds appealing or disappointing depends entirely on what you want from it.
👥 2 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designers: Aaron Hein & Manny Trembley
🎨 Artwork: Manny Trembley
🏢 Publisher: Druid City Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
At the center of the game is a circular play area divided into spaces around the tea table. Each player controls six spaces on their side, including one home space marked by an envelope.
On your turn, you pick up all shards from one of your spaces and distribute them clockwise around the table one by one. The final shard activates the effect of the space where it lands. That could mean dealing damage, healing, drawing cards, refreshing abilities, or triggering your home space effect.
The rules are easy to explain. The difficult part is understanding how quickly the board state starts changing. A move is never only about the immediate reward. It also changes what becomes possible two or three turns later. We had multiple moments where someone finished their turn looking very pleased with themselves, only to realize a few seconds later they had basically prepared the perfect setup for the opponent instead.
One detail we really liked is that optional actions can happen in any order during your turn. You can use cards first, activate abilities first, or move shards immediately. Once players start understanding how the board develops, turns become less about reacting and more about sequencing actions in the right order.
The centerpiece of the whole system is the doubler shard. It permanently stays on the board and completely changes how players think about movement. If the doubler is the final shard placed during movement, the effect activates twice. Unless it lands on your home space. Then it gives you an extra turn instead.
One extra turn here is often enough to completely change the board.
Because the doubler always has to be placed last when moved, players constantly track future landing spots in their head. Not only where it lands now, but where it could end up several turns later. After a while the game almost starts feeling like positional chess with glowing candy rocks.
Each guest also comes with plus-one cards that either create extra actions or slightly alter the normal rules. Some refresh and return later, others disappear after you use them a couple of times. On top of that, players draw commoner cards during the game for effects like extra turns, damage, moving shards, or disrupting the opponent.
We liked that the cards never completely took over the game. The board itself still feels like the real focus, while the cards mostly push and reshape situations around it.
Artwork, Components, and Visual Design
Madcala gets attention immediately once it hits the table. The included playmat barely looks like a traditional board game board. The whole thing is designed like a twisted Wonderland tea table viewed from above, complete with plates, forks, cakes, envelopes, and glowing details scattered everywhere.
It’s ridiculous in a fun way.
The artwork leans heavily into a darker Wonderland style. Alice, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit… they’re all here, but they look slightly unsettling and exaggerated, almost like storybook characters after too much caffeine.
The Cheshire Cat especially shows up everywhere looking suspiciously confident about your next mistake.
The cards themselves look great too. Strong colors, oversized expressions, dramatic poses. The visual style gives the game personality, which matters because without the Wonderland presentation the system underneath could have felt much colder and more mechanical.
The shards are nice quality as well. The pink and black pieces are easy to read on the board, while the larger doubler shards stand out immediately. Even the health dials continue the tea-party theme with cookies and cupcakes printed on them. Small detail, but it helps tie the whole production together.
The presentation does create slightly misleading expectations though. Looking at the box, you expect chaos, randomness, and wild cinematic moments. The actual gameplay is much slower and more controlled than the artwork suggests.
Our Experience
What surprised us most is how much depth comes from such a small rules core. Pick up shards, move them clockwise, activate effects. That’s basically it. Yet after only a few turns the board becomes full of future threats, dangerous setups, and possible chain reactions.
The doubler is easily the most important part of the design because it changes how every move is evaluated. Since it always has to be placed last, you constantly start calculating future landing spots in your head. Some of our favorite turns came from setting up a doubler activation several rounds in advance and finally watching the whole sequence work exactly the way we hoped.
The home space becomes incredibly important because of that. A normal activation already gives flexibility, but triggering it with the doubler for an extra turn can completely reshape the board before the opponent has time to respond. After a few games, matches started feeling less about direct damage and more about controlling initiative. Whoever controlled the pace of turns usually started controlling the rest of the game as well.
The guest powers and plus-one cards stop the game from becoming a pure abstract exercise and give every matchup a slightly different personality. At the same time, this is also where some balance concerns started appearing during our plays. Certain guests felt easier to use than others, while some combinations created much stronger momentum than expected. Maybe that smooths out once players know the matchups better, but early games definitely felt uneven depending on which guests faced each other.
The commoner cards ended up working better than expected. We initially thought they would push the game toward randomness, but most of the time they acted more like tactical tools than lucky swings. The hand limit also helps a lot because it stops players from endlessly saving cards for one giant combo turn. Sometimes spending a card early for a smaller advantage simply worked better than waiting too long.
One thing became obvious very quickly though: stronger players will probably dominate weaker players here. Madcala rewards counting spaces, reading future board states, recognizing setups, and sequencing actions correctly. If one player starts seeing the puzzle more clearly than the other, the gap becomes noticeable fast. That gives the game replay value, but it also means casual matchups may feel rough sometimes.
The presentation helps soften that sharper side of the game. The oversized playmat, colorful shards, and strange Wonderland characters make the whole thing feel more approachable than many abstract strategy games usually do. Without that visual identity, I suspect some groups would bounce off the system much faster.
Our Thoughts
Madcala feels like one of those games that will instantly connect with some players and completely miss for others.
The people in our group who enjoyed counting routes and planning several turns ahead liked it much more than the players who preferred improvising from turn to turn. This really is a game about positioning, planning, and slowly learning how the system behaves over repeated plays.
After a few sessions, it also stopped feeling like “mancala with powers” and started feeling like its own strange little thing. The doubler, extra turns, asymmetrical abilities, and card interactions push the game somewhere quite different from what the initial rules explanation suggests.
The Wonderland theme is weird, theatrical, slightly creepy, and occasionally a bit silly… but it sticks in your head. The giant tea-table board, oversized shards, and exaggerated artwork give the game personality in a way many abstract games simply don’t have.
I ended up much more positive on Madcala than expected. It doesn’t feel disposable. The more we played, the more little positional tricks and setups started appearing that we completely missed during the first game. Games usually don’t keep surprising us like that after several plays unless there’s actually something interesting underneath.
And honestly… any game that makes two grown adults stare angrily at a shiny pink rock for several minutes is probably doing something right.
📝 We received a copy of the game from Druid City Games.
