Tea Time

About this board game

Tea Time is a 30-minute card game for 2–4 players, inspired by the characters of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Invite characters to your collection, choose carefully from the shared array, and try to turn disappearing cards into a scoring advantage.

Each character card other than Alice has two sides: a normal image and a reverse, mirrored image. At the start of each round, the characters are arranged with normal and mirrored images alternating. The round’s start player takes one card and places Alice into the newly opened space, changing the choices available to the following players.

Taking cards becomes more flexible as the turn order progresses. The second player may take one or two cards, while each player from the third onward may take one to three. Whenever a player takes multiple cards, those cards must be adjacent in the array.

• Collect characters from Alice in Wonderland.
• Take adjacent groups of cards when permitted.
• Watch for normal and mirrored versions of the same character.
• Score sets while deciding whether disappearing cards may help your total.

If your collection ever contains both a normal and mirrored image of the same character, the pair disappears. This can reduce a collection, but it may also be useful: having zero cards of a character is worth five points, so not every disappearance is bad news.

After five rounds with two players, or three rounds with three or four players, the game ends. Players score from 1 to 15 points for collecting one to five cards of the same character, Alice is worth four points, and the player with the most points wins. Tea Time was released in 2012.