5-Minute Mystery Review – The Case of the Clicky Dials and a Stuffy Walrus

You start every game of 5-Minute Mystery by being addressed by a museum curator. Who also happens to be a walrus. He sits you down and cries:

I need your help. Someone’s stolen my MacGuffin!

Now it’s up to you and your friends to work cooperatively to find the “MacGuffin” before the time runs out. Which, despite the name, could be anywhere between five to ten minutes.

Already, the absurdity of 5-Minute Mystery had me chuckling. It carries the humour from 5-Minute Dungeon, bringing it to the mystery genre.

After you get a handful of suspect cards, select a scenario, and set up the mobile app. You’ll then start the clock, and spend the next however long scanning picture cards for hidden symbols.

Once you’ve found all five symbols (star, cross, circle, square and triangle), you’ll get to play with one of the most satisfying board game components ever made.

The Codex.

It’s impossible to quantify the tangibility of this component, especially since it’s so satisfying to play with. It has five chunky hexagonal rings, each one dedicated to a shape type. You get to turn these rings and click, click, CLICK them until the top of The Codex shows the pattern hidden in the picture.

Once you’re satisfied, flip the picture card, and compare the pattern shown with what you put into the codex.

Did you get it right?

The Usual Suspects

Most of what you’re doing in 5-Minute Mystery – finding patterns and comparing the codex. It’s not all of it. If the shapes on your codex match the back of the scene card you’ll get a clue.

This clue comes in the form of a cardboard token describing the perpetrator’s look. For instance, it might say that they’re furry or wear glasses. However, this clue only proves true if it’s placed side by side with the thief’s face-down token – as shown in the above picture.

Otherwise, it tells you the clue is incorrect, which is just as important.

Once we have a true piece of information, we can start eliminating suspects from our hand of cards.

Finding hidden symbols and working The Codex efficiently is hard going. So when you get it right and the game rewards you with a clue token, you feel fantastic. But when you draw a clue that matches the thief.

Oh boy!

It’s a shot of adrenaline like the first time you kissed a girl or snuck out of the house without telling your parents. A true clue eliminates so much work for the team, it feels fantastic.

While you’re celebrating your victories, the time keeps ticking away. Once it runs out, you’ll get no more clues as to who the thief is. Instead, you’ll need to channel your inner Hercule Poirot and use all your deduction skills and uncovered clues to accuse one of the animals of the crime.

Get it right, and you win the game.

Your Time is Up, Chump

Like its predecessor 5-Minute Dungeon, another excellent real-time cooperative game, 5-Minute Mystery understands what’s needed to make a real-time game fun. The two competing objectives of finding symbols, and deducing bad guys splits your attention in a way that makes you constantly reprioritise what’s important right now.

This creates fun and frantic gameplay, where you know you need to eliminate suspects, but your friends need your help finding the symbols. All the while, that stupid stuffy walrus counts down the seconds.

What’s excellent about 5-Minute Mystery, when compared to other real-time games like Pandemic: Rapid Response, is that you’re always involved in what’s happening within the game. There’s no waiting for someone’s turn, or pausing to catch your breath.

Once that timer starts you’re doing something to benefit the team.

And the pressure you feel from this timer is no joke.

Even when you’re provided more than enough time, the energy and tension the counting walrus creates is palpable. Before you know it, the game is over and you’ll be amazed at how quickly it went by.

A 5-Minute Parlour Scene

For me, 5-Minute Mystery is a blue moon board game. It’s one of the best real-time games I’ve ever played and one of my favourite games from 2020.

But only when the conditions are right.

For instance, the box recommends 1-6 players, but I wouldn’t play it with more than three. Purely because everyone wants to be as close to the picture cards as possible. With six players, you’ll need a pair of opera glasses to even get close.

Then the rule book recommends a mini-campaign of five games in a row. But, for us, after three games in a row, we were tired of the mechanics of the 5-Minute Mystery.

Hence, it’s best played once in a blue moon.

Despite saying this, you’ll be surprised at how often a blue moon arises. 5-Minute Mystery was one of my most played games of last year. It is just too easy to break out when you have 10 minutes to play and serves a whole swathe of demographics from new to experienced players of board games.