The game in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that uses flamingos as mallets is croquet. Alice plays it at the Queen of Hearts' croquet ground, where the familiar sport becomes a deliberately impossible spectacle.
Instead of wooden equipment, the players use live flamingos as mallets, live hedgehogs as balls, and soldiers as hoops. The animals do not behave like sporting equipment: the flamingos twist their necks, while the hedgehogs move unpredictably. This makes the game impossible to control and mirrors the arbitrary authority of the Queen of Hearts.
The scene is often remembered from adaptations, but Carroll’s original version is especially chaotic. The Queen repeatedly demands executions, and the game’s rules never become stable enough to produce fair play. Croquet is therefore not just a recognizable Victorian pastime; it is one of the clearest examples of Wonderland transforming ordinary social rules into nonsense.