Five Minutes in the Dungeon

Today is a sad day.  I've had a student teacher in my grade four class since September and today is his last day.  Yes, I'm partially sad about the fact that I'm going to have to teach again (it's much easier to sit and watch him teach than to actually do it), but I'm mostly sad about just not having him around anymore.  We have a lot in common.  He is also a board game geek and so we've had lots to talk about during our down time.  We have actually both spent time working for our churches in youth and children's ministry, so there's been that to connect over as well.  I had the class pitch in together and we bought him the Return to Hoth expansion for Star Wars: Imperial Assault.  He hasn't opened it yet but I'll let you know how it goes!

During the last three months, we've had a chance to play a few games.  I introduced him to The Lost Expedition and he showed me the wonderful world of Marvel Legendary.  Today, we got to play one more game while the kids were off in music class: 5-Minute Dungeon!

In 5-Minute Dungeon you have five minutes (wow, really?) to clear out a dungeon (wow, really?) of baddies.  You'll have to overcome obstacles, battle mini bosses, outsmart monsters, and take down the big boss at the end.  When you flip over a door card and reveal the badness on the other side, there will be symbols that you need to match to the card to defeat it: arrow, shield, sword, scroll, and a running guy.  There are also a plethora of other specialty cards that serve as wild cards, one-shots that instantly take out a certain type of enemy, allow you to draw more cards, or give your whole hand to another player.  There are also 10 characters to choose from (on 5 double sided player boards) each with a different ability (e.g. discard three cards to defeat a monster or discard three cards to pause the timer).  There are five different monsters and dungeons to take on, each progressively more difficult than the last.  There is a free timer app for your mobile device, but any timer would do.

We played two players so we had to combine two different character decks together each and had a hand size of five.  We started with the first boss and worked our way up to the third.  I haven't beat the third dungeon before, so it was good to take a crack at it!

These pictures are all from our defeat of the Gorgon, the third boss.  I think we had about a minute left.  I played as the wizard so I could stop time and allow us a breather to plan our next attack.  This is my favourite timed game thus far (I've also played Escape: Curse of the Temple and FUSE).  It's got a fun fantasy theme, it's frantically fast, and easy enough that anyone can jump in.  My games group has been using this as our starter game of the night to make us all anxious and eager to play something else!

I picked this up for $30 CDN at Toys R Us and I see it is also at Amazon for the same price.  In my opinion, it is well worth it!