Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Mayhem Card Game: Monster Madness is a two to six player card game that is pretty easy to follow, but becomes challenging as the players whittle each other down. There are plenty of characters to pick from, each with their own playstyles, which requires you to remember roughly how the others work.
Monster Madness starts off with you picking a character. We’ve played quite a few rounds, changing characters each time, and most are very well balanced. They have different abilities depending on what character they are; the mimic can copy abilities from others, the owlbear can attack everyone at once instead of just one character, and the shapeshifter has cards that work differently depending on what form they are in, for example.
Each character comes with a health card and a card that explains all of the actions that are presented on their deck. The two four actions are the same within each deck; a shield icon on cards means you have a shield, a lightning means you can play another card, a card icon means you can draw a card, and a sword icon means you can attack someone. The further three icons are character specific and do explain what they do for your individual character.
When it comes to gameplay in Monster Madness, on your turn you will draw a card, then play a card. You must do both of those actions. Then, you need to resolve what is on your card. You can use lightning to chain up infinitely, as if you run out of cards and still have a move left, you get to draw two cards and keep going.
In our group, there are a few members that are a bit more competitive than others, so there were some really aggressive chained attacks at individuals until they were destroyed, with the destroyed players then having to wait for the rest of the game to finish. Other times, we all sort of whittled each other down and then it all really came down to the last few moves where everyone was suddenly dropping dead as people had curated their hands.
At some points, there were accidental deaths in the game too, as a player would target one person, but had special attacks that would hit the person next to them, and suddenly that person is dead. You do need to play attention in Monster Madness, as there is just so much going on. I really enjoyed our time with this card game, I found the characters to be very unique and mostly balanced. I also enjoyed how simplistic the game was to pick up and play.
You can find Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Mayhem Card Game: Monster Madness on Amazon.
