5-Minute Dungeon
In the litlgeeks and MUReview household, we love comics, entertainment, pop culture, but we were born and raised on games.  We started with table top, love our video games, and also love card games of any kind.  Table top / card gaming is unquestionably experiencing a renaissance in recent years.  A ton of fantastic games are out for all ages.  Out of the fantastic, there are always a few that bubble up and rise even higher.  I’m here today to talk to you about one of those games.  5-Minute Dungeon will come kicking and screaming into the world by way of a Kickstarter campaign that starts 11/1/16.  Within a day or so of this review going live, the Kickstarter will be live, so you can go ahead and CLICK THIS WHOLE FIRST PARAGRAPH if you want to get in on the Kickstarter action.  I’ll put a link at the end too.  For now, read on to see just how much we love 5-Minute Dungeon!

Gameplay – A+

5-Minute Dungeon is a simple, fast-paced “dungeon crawler” for 2-5 players.  The game has you battling obstacles, people, monsters, mini-bosses, and bosses.  Make no mistake though, your real opponent in 5-Minute Dungeon is the clock, and the clock is just plain evil.  As implied by the name, you have 5 minutes to navigate through a dungeon (cards), defeat obstacles (cards), and mini-bosses (cards), all the way up to the Dungeon Boss (5 dungeon bosses are included in the main game). 

Each player is chooses a hero from plenty.  Each hero has their own special, useful ability they can trigger by turning in cards.  Each player takes a color deck that matches their hero.  In our case, litlmommy and I played 2-player, so we took two decks (it’s cool, the rules said we could!).  You then throw down 10 door cards per player, and 2 miniboss cards per player and shuffle them up.  Heros will draw 5 cards from the top of their shuffled color deck. Note, 5 cards applies to two players, each player has less active cards depending on the number of players 3-5.  

Now you’ve got your dungeon, your dungeon cards, your hero, your hero cards, and you are ready to roll?  But…you need a timer.  Along with the game will launch the 5-Minute Dungeon timer app for iOS and Android.  For us, since this was pre-release, we used our trusty Amazon Echo.  With timer set to 5 minutes, we flipped our first card and down we went into the depths of 5-Minute Dungeon.  

Each door, mini-boss and boss card has a set of cards required to defeat it, magic, arrow, sword, shield, stealth, etc…  You’ll find these cards in your heroes deck along with some special action / ability cards that allow more cards to be drawn, obstacles and monsters to be defeated w/ one shot, etc.    The object of the game is to toss cards down from your hand onto the monster, obstacle, person, boss to satisfy the pass requirements.  Once passed, those cards are removed, next card is flipped and the hero fills their hand back to starting requirements.

In our example, as two players, we had 20 door cards, 4 mini-boss cards and the boss.  With 5-Minutes to get through it all, things got absolutely frantic.  It took us 2-3 tries to knock out our first boss and we had a blast doing it.  

This game is absolutely about cooperation to defeat the clock and all of the obstacles and it is a blast!

The Materials – A+

5-Minute Dungeon is gleaming with clever and funny artwork, from the box to the heroes to the obstacles and bosses.  There is quick wit and humor painted across each card and the artwork is all top notch, engrossing even.  

The box is well thought out with space for all of your cards and …space for…expansion cards?  I hope so!

Overall – A+

 

The rest

5-Minute Dungeon is a frantic and fast paced table top / card game that is sure to bring family and friends together to defeat funny and colorful obstacles and enemies.  We wanted our first play-throughs to be without our litlgeeks so that we could get the lay of the land and learn the game.  Tonight’s play through will incorporate our 6 year old first grader.  While it’s fun and it looks great, it’s a little too complicated for our 4 year old.  Bearing that in mind, that this is great for family fun, it’s probably even more fun with adult friends and adult beverages played over and over and over and over and over again!  Now remember folks, the Kickstarter for this fantastic game starts 11/1.  Head over there and be honored to support great projects like this.  5-Minute Dungeon is absolutely worth your 5-Minutes and the price of entry! Click here to Kickstart it!

Speaking of…this is a Kickstarter project.  What we played is basically a pre-release prototype.  Folks, the finished product is going to be freaking phenomenal if this is how exceptional a prototype is!!

This video and post is for entertainment purposes only. | Toys in this post are recommended for ages 6 and up. | litlgeeks received the products in this post for free to review for you!