Today is a look at a game I discovered at Wal-Mart, of
all places. Typically, they do not have
the best selection of board games of the type I am interested in. However, this one caught my eye for a simple
reason it was designed to be a quick cooperative game. As you may recall, my family likes cooperative games and I get tired
of losing to my family all the time.
This seemed like a good compromise.
The game is called 5-MinuteDungeon and I bought mine for about $20 bucks.
Things That I
Liked
The game is a cooperative card game. I do not have a ton of experience with these
types of games, so I am sure the features I discuss below will be very familiar
to many of you card gamers.
You choose between 10 heroes, and each group of 2 has a
different set of cards, and all of them have a unique ability. The card deck has different combinations of “suits”
that make fighter guys better at fighting, rogue types better at sneaking,
ranged guys better at shooting, and magic characters better at knowledge. Therefore, each color deck has a unique mix
of abilities.
The “Dungeon” is a deck of door cards. On the other side is various encounters where
you need combinations of cards to bypass them.
Therefore, you will want a mix of Hero types to give you the best
combination of abilities and likelihood of cards to bypass various encounters. There are sub-bosses and then a large boss at
the end. Therefore, conserving the right
cards for the end battle is a must.
If you run you run out of cards your character dies. Therefore, if you are not using your cards
well your team will probably not beat the dungeon as you need a mix to beat the
harder encounter cards.
Did I mention that it is cooperative? Either the party all win, or you all
loose. Thumbs up!
Things I Do Not
Like
You only have 5 minutes to bypass every card in the dungeon
deck, with the dungeon getting progressively more doors/encounters as you go up
in difficulty level. I am not a fan of
this timer approach for two reasons:
- The game does not come with a 5 minute timer!
- I think a more leisurely pace would allow you to “enjoy” the game further
Instead, you are so busy slapping down cards that you do not
spend much time thinking about your team strategy, talking to each other beyond
grunts, or appreciating the clever artwork/word play in the game.
It also becomes clear pretty fast that characters that allow
you to draw new hands or more cards are way better than characters who can
bypass certain obstacle types. Soon, the
characters you are taking become pretty set as accessing more cards to play is
better than discarding three cards and bypassing an encounter. The one outlier are the special abilities
that stop the timer. A cool idea in
theory, but a bit fiddly in the execution.
Meh and Other
Uncertainties
There are 10 Heroes, but really they are just slight
variants of 5. I applaud the attempt,
but it just isn’t enough variety.
Since the game only takes about 5 minutes to play, it is
a bit discouraging that set-up can take about the same length of time. I mean, you have to shuffle each character’s
deck, the dungeon deck, load the sub-bosses, etc. Still you can play several games in 30
minutes to an hour.
It has decent re-playability as the dungeons get harder
(I mean longer) you tend to die more often.
Plus, the cards get less interesting the more you see them. However, the tactical play and strategy is
not deep enough to play for more than an hour or so without getting tired of it
all. However, an hour of family time
playing a game that is not on a screen is pretty decent value for $20. We have sat down and played it as much as
games like King of Tokyo, Pandemic, Flick’emUp and Machi Koro. For a “specialty” game from a big-box
retailer not know for such things; that is a pretty good deal.
Final Thoughts
Since I am starting to experiment and think a bit about
how card mechanics works and how they could be used for various resolution
mechanics this was an interesting buy for me.
It worked good for the type of games my family was interested in and
helped me get a good basic overview of one way cards can help resolve
mechanics. Overall, I was pleased with
my purchase.
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