Review: 5-Minute Dungeon

• October 4, 2017
• James Skemp
• review

The following is a review of 5-Minute Dungeon, received as part of the Amazon Vine program.

Five Frantic Minutes

First of all, 5-Minute Dungeon does not actually take only five minutes to play, since the setup, especially depending upon the number of players, does take a couple of minutes.

However, once you’re actually setup, 5-Minute Dungeon does take around five minutes, if not less.

Players each select one of 5 character boards (with each board having two characters on it) that will determine their deck and special ability.

Then one of the five provided bosses is selected, and a dungeon (which consists of monsters and traps) is created based upon the difficulty of that box. A five-minute timer is started (anything that can be paused and resumed will work, but they do have a free app with different voices that you can install on your mobile device) and you flip over the first card in the dungeon, trying to use the cards in your hand to defeat that obstacle and move onto the next.

The end goal is to defeat the boss, but through the luck of the cards you might end up hitting a roadblock fairly early on, or right when you hit the boss. 5-Minute Dungeon is definitely a difficult game, with the majority of the games we played ending up in a loss, just against the first, weakest, boss.

However, we actually quite enjoyed the game. The fast paced, cooperative, action keeps you on your toes, and does result in wasted cards every once in a while.

There’s enough diversity in the box to get a good chunk of replayability, as long as you’re okay with the core gameplay. But the game could also be expanded (not that it needs it) with additional bosses, monsters, and characters.

Despite lossing a number of times, I actually give 5-Minute Dungeon pretty high ranks. The only real problem I had with it is the shape of the box (the photo makes it look like it comes in a bag, but that’s actually the shape of the box), but that’s minor.

For these reasons I give 5-Minute Dungeon a full five of five stars. While the title doesn’t account for setup time, this is definitely a fun, frantic, game.

• review
• board game