The game played with flamingos as mallets and hedgehogs as balls is croquet.
Alice joins the Queen of Hearts’ bizarre croquet game near the end of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel. It resembles ordinary lawn croquet, but Wonderland replaces the equipment with living creatures: flamingos serve as mallets, hedgehogs become balls, and the Queen’s card soldiers act as hoops. Because the animals move unpredictably, the game is nearly impossible to play by normal rules.
The scene turns a genteel Victorian pastime into a display of royal chaos. The Queen repeatedly interrupts the game to order executions, and the soldiers have to stop serving as hoops whenever someone is dragged away. Alice notices that the flamingos keep turning their heads and the hedgehogs run off instead of cooperating. Modern adaptations often preserve this visual gag, though details vary. The answer is croquet, not golf or tennis: those games use very different equipment and do not belong to Carroll’s original scene.