Dungeon Mayhem

Dungeon Mayhem is another D&D inspired game, this time a card game in which four players battle to the death.

Each player picks one of the four characters and takes the appropriate character deck. They then shuffle the deck and draw three cards and the game is ready to start.

Each turn, a player draws one more card and then plays a card. The cards can be used to attack, defend, recover health, get more cards or uses a special power (each character has their own special powers). Defensive cards stay in play until they’re destroyed, all other played cards are discarded and it’s the next players turn.

Normally you only play one card per turn, but some cards let you play additional cards, which can be useful. And if you run out of cards, you draw two more and keep going.

The last player standing wins the game.

Dungeon Mayhem is a really simple game. It’s quick to set up, it’s easy to understand and each game is over very quickly. And, because the games tend to be over quickly, being knocked out isn’t much of an issue because the next game will start very shortly. What we tend to find, in fact, is that everyone bar the winner will be knocked out in the last couple of turns.

The game can be played by two to four players and we have found that the four-player version works really well, providing scope to watch which players are looking strongest and react accordingly. Playing with two players is less challenging — both players tend to simply blast each other and whoever went first invariably wins.

This is a fun and fast game and a very portable one. The only problem for us — as a family of five — is that only four people can play at a time. Maybe I should look into the expansion.