Real-Time Heroes – 5 Minute Marvel Review

I’m not a huge fan of real-time games, mainly because my brain doesn’t make decisions that quickly and thus I often find myself behind everybody else.

Cooperative games can be a little different, because everybody’s trying to help each other and you’re not competing with everybody else.

But it can still be annoying.

Then you have a game like 5 Minute Marvel, the game with a bit of a confusing title (more on that in a bit).

5 Minute Marvel is a real-time cooperative card game published by Korea Boardgames and Spin Master in 2018.

It was designed by Connor Reid with artwork by Alex Diochon.

How is it confusing?

Each player gets to be one of a series of Marvel heroes, all of you working through a bunch of villain bosses to make your way to the ultimate boss: Thanos (of course).

But are you?

Yes, and no.

If you take the game at its name (5-Minute Marvel), it sounds like the game takes 5 minutes.

Wow, what a great way to kill some time at lunch or between games!

However, the rulebook makes it sound like you are actually working through the five other bosses (each boss tile is double-sided with a different boss on the other side, hence the three in the picture above) in the game to take on Thanos, and each boss fight takes up to 5 minutes, assuming you win them all.

To me, that sounds like 30 minutes, not 5.

Even longer if you fail any of the bosses, in which case you have to face them again.

That being said, you can just do what we did and play through the first boss a number of times (we did three) just to get a feel for the game.

This gets confusing when you are recording your plays on BG Stats, but I guess that’s a first world problem.

Anyway, the game itself (or each fight, anyway) is pretty simple.

Each player chooses a hero and you get access to that hero’s deck of cards.

There are also standard resource cards that everybody has access to.

These standard resources are what you typically will be playing to defeat villains of various types (some of whom are even called “villain”!).

Hero decks will also have some of these resource symbols, in addition to the special cards that they will have.

The Mission Deck consists of a bunch of different villain-type cards as well as a few Crisis cards.

These will be flipped one at a time and players will play cards of matching symbols to defeat them (for villains, or what the game calls “Door cards”) or do what the Crisis says.

Another way to defeat a Door card is to use a hero card that lets you do something special like “automatically defeat a Minion”.

You have to go through the whole deck and defeat the boss in 5 minutes or you lose the mission.

You can also lose it if you can’t legally play a card or you run out of cards (not sure how that can happen, but maybe?)

When the top Mission card is flipped, you have to be quick and play a card with at least one of the symbols required to defeat that Door card.

The rules are a little iffy on some of the nuances in this play.

What happens if two people start to lay down cards with the same symbol, enough so that one of them isn’t needed?

Did you waste a card? What if your hand is still on it?

The rules don’t say, so make it up yourself.

It’s a cooperative game, so if you’re losing, maybe let them do it?

It’s not cheating if the rules don’t say, right?

Each hero also has a special power that can be used, which can make things very helpful (though you should definitely use at least one hero that lets you draw cards, in case you get stuck.

If you’re ever down to below the minimum hand size (which varies by player count), you draw up to that minimum.

You start the game with only basic resource cards, but when you draw up, you can draw from either your Hero deck (which only has 10 cards in total) or the standard deck.

That’s pretty much the game.

Get through the Mission deck in 5 minutes, you win and onto the next one!

Or not, if that’s how you roll.

There’s really not much to this game but speed and quick identification of colours and Door types.

For that reason, as a real-time game, it doesn’t bother me that much even though I’m not a fan of them.

The theme is very loose since there’s not always seemingly a reason why you need that combination of cards to defeat them.

The resources are fairly unimaginatively named: Tech, Fist, Jump, Energy, and Shield.

Why would you need a Jump icon to defeat Kang?

For a 5-minute game (or 30-minute game if played the full 6 times), it’s also very fiddly to set up.

You first have to shuffle all of the Mission cards and Crisis cards again.

Then count out the Mission cards based on the number on the boss.

Add Crisis cards and other Mission cards to the deck based on the number of players.

If you’re doing that six times, that’s a lot of shuffling and dealing.

This does allow some coming and going if people need to leave or arrive or finish their game.

Each mission, the deck gets reset so you can add or remove card requirements as the new number of players dictates.

It’s an easy game, perfect for bringing in a newbie because all it is really is colour matching with some powers hidden in there (which you can go over and are pretty easy to understand).

The gameplay is just kind of meh, though.

I didn’t dislike it, and I’ll willingly play it if it’s suggested (and I wouldn’t mind playing through an entire “campaign” once since it’s only 30 minutes or so), but it’s not a game that really grabbed me.

If you like the Marvel theme, that will help.

Maybe not enough?

That’s up to you to decide.

I’ll gladly hold it up as a real-time game I’m willing to play, though.

So that’s something.

(This review was written after 3 plays of the first mission)