5-Minute Mystery – Standard Edition

Spooky Goings-On At The Museum

The Museum of Everything has suffered from a spate of thefts and only you and your team can help! I’m not joking, in this cooperative game for 1-6 players, you’ll be solving so many mysteries at the same location you have to wonder if they even lock the doors.

5-Minute Mystery is from the same team that brought us the excellent 5-Minute Marvel and 5-Minute Dungeon. Unlike those titles though, Mystery swaps the rapid card matching with escape room style spotting. Like its stablemates though, this is a frantic real-time game, sure to get your heart racing, as you shout at your friends to hurry up. Or, I guess, at yourself if played single player.

The Set-Up

Each game of 5-Minute Mystery is quick and easy to get going, resembling the Gamewright kids classic ‘Outfoxed‘. To start you pick a ‘case’, with each case explaining your objective – usually catching just one criminal -any wrinkles to the rules and how many minutes you have to complete the challenge.

Once you have the objective you can download the lovely free app which reads out your objective and acts as a glorified timer. Then, choose a random ‘culprit’ from a stack of cards and arrange the other components neatly, ready for the kick-off.

Once the game starts you have the following tasks to complete:

1)You need to look at the beautiful game cards showing pictures of the museum. On these are a series of symbols; a cross, triangle, circle, square and star. Each is slightly different and the correct image needs to be dialled into the supplied codex. The codex is a nice chunky plastic thing you spin to show the correct symbols. Once you’ve found all 5 you flip the card and compare it to your codex. If all 5 symbols match you can move to step 2

2)Now you can pick a clue from one of the stacks, these will be things like a purse, item of jewellery or scarf that the criminal may be wearing. Each has a barcode that you can match against the criminal card. If there is a match you know that the criminal has that item in their picture.

3)Keep going, flipping cards, shouting and making mistakes until you think you know which suspect is the real criminal. All before time runs out. When you think you’ve eliminated enough suspects and think you know who did it, stop the timer and flip the criminal card. If it’s who you guessed, then you win. If it’s not, you lose.

The Caper

Make no mistake, 5-Minute Mystery is a very simple game. I compared it earlier to Outfoxed which has always been a firm family favourite. 5-Minute Mystery is basically half of Outfoxed but with a timer. Despite this, the game plays very differently. In each game of 5-Minute Mystery, you are almost forced to share out tasks; one player checking for clues and shouting out nonsense like “Cross with three crosses”, “Square that looks like a castle”. One player frantically spinning the plastic contraption and two others stressing about interpreting clues and sorting through their stack of suspects.

That’s the good side and the game scales beautifully. Unlike a dedicated ‘kids’ game like Outfoxed, this played well with a 6 and 9-year old without us parents feeling bored. The game also plays just as well with adults. The downside though is the game is quite one-note, once you’ve played it a couple of times, you’ll have seen all it has to offer.

The Getaway

I’d definitely recommend picking up a copy of 5-Minute Mystery if you don’t already have a real-time game in your collection. It’s really simple to explain and to play, and a great way to dip your tow in and see if you like this style of game. Real-time games like this can be very stressful as there are no turns, and everyone is throwing cards around and getting excited or stressed. You may love it or you may find it the opposite of the relaxed gaming session you were expecting.