5-Minute Dungeon Review – Don’t Make Me Crawl Back to the Baby Barbarian

No matter the game, as soon as you add a sand timer, things have the possibility of getting wild. The pressure the sand puts on you as it slides from top to bottom of the hourglass, makes you act in ways you otherwise wouldn’t. It’s also the secret ingredient that makes 5-Minute Dungeon a winner.

To start a game of 5-Minute Dungeon, you choose a generic role-playing archetype to play. So think Barbarian, Wizard, Rogue, etc. Gaining their set of cards which includes a wide range of basic skills and a couple of unique class abilities.

You’ll also pick out the boss you want to fight. It’s recommended to start with the Baby Barbarian and work your way up. But as we’ll talk about later, sometimes a different approach works better.

Then put together a deck of obstacles. When you start the timer, these obstacles are overcome only when your team puts together a set of basic skill cards to defeat. The nature of the obstacle determines the skills required. For instance, opening a door may require 3 strength cards, but fighting a wolf might require 2 strength, 2 agility, and a defence card.

Once you’re all set up, start the timer. From here on out, it will be up to your team to coordinate sets of cards to defeat these obstacles. Usually, this involves a lot of shouting, cursing and throwing cards across the table. You can also use your special abilities during this time to make sure you have the right cards in hand.

Only after you defeat all of the obstacles can you take on the boss. They are a powered-up version of the obstacle cards. Requiring more skill cards to defeat.

Beat the boss, you win the game.

Then you move on to the next boss. Increasing the difficulty by adding more obstacle cards to the deck. Keep defeating bosses until you either run out of bosses to beat, run out of time, or run out of cards to throw at them. Because in these later two scenarios, you lose the game and must restart your dungeon run from the Baby Barbarian all over again.

Great in short bursts

This game is legitimate mayhem, with players yelling over one another and throwing their cards with wild abandon. It’s a lot of fun, but there’s not much replayability.

Despite there being five different bosses and a large amount of different obstacles. There are almost no perceptible differences between one encounter and the next. So after you’ve completed a challenge, there’s little reason to come back.

This is the big story of 5-Minute Dungeon. The bosses all play the same, and the classes all play the same. The only difference between one scenario and the next is the amount of basic skill cards you need to use.

While you’re progressing, and the challenge gets harder, this is a lot of fun. However, if you lose the rulebook suggests going back to the first dungeon and starting again. Yet this is like telling a toddler they need to go back to crawling after they’ve mastered running. You’ve improved so much that this is no longer a challenge, and therefore it’s boring.

So in our plays, we ignored this rule and kept running the same dungeon on defeat. This kept us entertained for a solid 2-3 hours. But once we were done, no one wanted to play 5-Minute Dungeon again.

At least not right away.

Once everyone forgot how to play efficiently, we were able to bring it back out and once again capture the frantic feeling of our first time playing. This is the same criticism of the sequel game 5-Minute Mystery which is another game that’s brilliant but only in short bursts.

Thankfully, there is an expansion 5-Minute Dungeon: Curses! Foiled Again that goes a long way to fixing this flaw. It provides better powers to make classes feel more individual, and all of the bosses have their own cards to give them a unique flavour. It’s a must-have expansion, but I’ll save the rest of my gushing for a separate review.

You keep saying it’s good, why though?

5-Minute Dungeon is the ultimate game of hand management, communication and efficiency. But trying to be efficient when there’s a time limit is a difficult ask. Especially when you don’t have complete information about what other players have in their hands.

It forces you to make judgment calls and take risks you don’t have time to discuss with your team. This leads to spontaneity and having to react faster than you want. It’s the exact kind of frantic fun that you want from a real-time game.

But at this speed don’t expect 5-Minute Dungeon to be a deep game. It only moves as fast as it does, because it’s so straightforward to play and win.

Now aside from its razor-sharp gameplay, 5-Minute Dungeon is a lot of fun just experience. Especially if you have some familiarity with D&D or any Computer RPGs from the early 2000’s. All of the art is playful with its subject matter, and it’s fully cognizant of the tropes of the genre.

From the very uncomfortable chair (a reference to the pointiness of the Iron Throne) to the massive pauldrons (a jab at World of Warcraft) if you’re a nerd, you’ll get a laugh from this game.

This humour and joviality continues through to the accompanying free app. With 5 different narrators all with silly personalities. One of which is the designer Connor Reid himself!

Although I’d argue that 5-Minute Dungeon is not the most fun you can have in 5 minutes, it comes close. Particularly when the game is fresh, and you haven’t worked out all of the kinks just yet. At that point, it’s a brilliant and fun game that’s accessible to anyone. Unfortunately, it loses its sheen after you complete it the first time. But after a while on the bench, you can bring it back out and enjoy it as though it was the first time you played.

Otherwise, keep an eye out for the upcoming expansion 5-Minute Dungeon: Curses! Foiled Again.