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Exclusive Interview with the Creator and Publishers of 5-Minute Dungeon!

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Category: Age: 8+ 5 - 30 Min 2 - 5 Players 2017
Designers: Artists: Publishers:

What inspired you to make a real time co-op with a dungeon crawling theme?
Connor Reid: We started playing the mobile game Spaceteam a lot in the office, and were having a blast with it. There’s a certain feeling while playing that game that you’re always just about to run out of time, and there’s a lot of fun to be in the chaos of working together to accomplish something.
I started thinking about how you could translate that feeling into a board game and whether you could create a board game that felt as frantic and intense as a video game.
At the same time, I had been toying with the idea of a condensed Dungeons & Dragons experience, shrinking down a 6-hour campaign into something most people could get into. I didn’t realize I would end up shrinking it down to just 5 minutes!

What kind of gaming experience do you want to create with this game?
Connor Reid: I’ve been pushing to make a co-operative game for a while now, but never quite had the right system for it. At Wiggles 3D, we’ve made many trivia and dexterity games, but I wanted to create a game that would be accessible to casual gamers and hardcore gamers alike. I set out to make a game that evoked a sense of “controlled chaos”, and that had players laughing and engaged the entire time they were playing.
When you’re playing 5-Minute Dungeon, it’s the only thing you’re thinking about. It demands a lot from you.

What was the greatest challenge that you faced during the designing and development of the game?
We’ve been making games for 15 years, so we have a lot of experience with designing games and testing them. We’ve also cultivated excellent partners who will be helping us with sourcing, manufacturing and shipping. So we weren’t concerned about any of those factors. But we knew going in that preparing properly for the Kickstarter campaign would be our greatest challenge. We spoke to several companies that shared their experiences on Kickstarter. We also consumed as much information as we could about how to prepare the campaign.
Even with all that preparation, we were very nervous on the first day of the campaign. As it turns out, the reaction from reviewers and backers has been outstanding, and we couldn’t be happier!

What is your favorite element/moment of the game?
5-Minute Dungeon is the sort of game that generates a frenzied chaos that’s really satisfying to see… players yelling, flinging cards down, frantically drawing cards as the timer ticks down to zero. We’ve seen it regularly in our playtests and it never ceases to bring a smile to our faces.

What kind of gamers is this game suitable for?
Because the root mechanism of the game is very simple – you’re working together to match symbols on a door card — it can be played by very young players. We recommend 8+, but we’ve seen it played by children as young as 5 years old. But that doesn’t mean the game doesn’t have much depth… learning how to effectively use character abilities and action cards can be very tricky, especially at the higher levels!
It’s not a heavy strategy game by any means, but we believe that even hardcore gamers will appreciate the nuances of the game.

What else can we expect in the future from Wiggles 3D?
5-Minute Dungeon is occupying all of our attention at the moment, but we’re always working on new designs at Wiggles 3D. We’re still evaluating Kickstarter as a distribution platform, but with the success of 5-Minute Dungeon, I think you’ll see something new from us on Kickstarter in the future!

5-Minute Dungeon has been launched on Kickstarter, where it was fully funded in 6 hours and now the funding is over 500%!  The campaign will be running until early December where you can get your own copy of this incredible game!

There’s also a giveaway on our website! Get a chance to win one copy of 5 Minute Dungeon! 

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