Mad Tea Party

This is going to be a bit of a different review than most. The main difference is I haven’t played Mad Tea Party. I also won’t get to play it as I made the very easy decision to give it to a family that will get WAY more use than I ever could. In fact, they already have.

 So a few months back my sister-by-choice (for lack of a more accurate term) flew her family back to Alberta for something (I don’t remember what) and one of the games I broke up with them was Mad Tea Party. It got played without me, while I was cooking, but I got to watch the kids and they absolutely LOVED it. It was a bit of a challenge to get them to stop and put it away. That alone says a lot, and I was excited to give it a try. Timing, stuff, excuses, blah, blah, blah, I didn’t get to play it.

Jump ahead to last weekend and the same sister (now also pregnant with her fifth) came back to celebrate her 10th anniversary with family and friends at the same location in the mountains of Canmore. Many of her friends and her husband’s family are boardgamers. So naturally, I brought a few, and since we had the entire inn to ourselves, the staff cleared space and they stayed out all weekend. Remembering how well it went before, and knowing that there would be seven kids under 8 and two more just a bit older, I brought Mad Tea Party. Again, I didn’t get to play, but other than short periods of “ok clean up for X thing now” that game didn’t leave the coffee table all weekend, and even then I don’t think it was actually put away with the other games, just left there for the kids to open again first thing in the morning. If there were kids in the room, the game was out. Even after I had packed away the rest of the games I brought kids were playing with it.

The game is labelled for 2-10 players, ages 5+ (which is a hard age group to hit with anything most older kids would still find interesting.) Gameplay is super simple. take a card from your hand, play it, and do what the card says. Run out of cards, you win. Most cards will ask you to add one of three sizes of teacups onto the building stack. Sometimes you can start a new stack of cups. All of this happens on a wobbly table, but you can also play without the table and just on your own stable table. There are a handful of special cards that do other things, but that’s the game in a nutshell. Or rather, that’s the game in a teacup. 

 Around half the kids were under 5 and they still played. Now, mostly that meant playing by their own rules, and those rules were often more akin to shot put. So here’s where I bring up another important note for parents of youngins. The game was played on a hard tile floor, and anything that fits nicely in small hands is probably going to become a projectile. Somehow, and I truly am shocked by this, not a single thing broke. Not a cup handle, not the “tea” in the cups, not the wobbly table, not even the cards (which are thicker than standard cards, because kids), nothing. Major props to Funko for that feat. 

I could have kept the game and found other kids to play it with. But knowing how popular it was with these kids, I just gave it to them. I said I didn’t much care which family wanted it, because all the kids loved it and knowing it has such a good home now pleases me. So while an observational review is not my preferred method, I think this time it’s probably an even better method than playing it myself. (Which, for the record, I’m sure all of my adult player groups would have loved doing.)

You can find Funko Games, online at funkogames.com/ or on Facebook at facebook.com/funkogames.