Dungeon Mayhem is a small card game released by Wizards of the Coast that allows two to four players to attempt to defeat each other in an everyone-for-themselves brawl in the D&D world. It’s fast, furious, and quite random, playing in about 10 minutes or less. It’s entirely the sort of filler game I tend not to play.

However, upon watching my younger friends playing it on the weekend, there’s no denying that they enjoyed the game. They played it again and again, and were happy to return to it after longer, more “serious” games.

The game comes with four 28-card decks, tokens, rules, four hit point tracker cards and four symbol (explanation) cards. The decks represent the abilities of Sutha the Skullcrusher (barbarian), Azzan the Mystic (wizard), Lia the Radiant (paladin), and Oriax the Clever (rogue). Each deck is unique, with some cards having abilities only that character can use. The artwork and abilities add a lot of personality to the game.

The basics of gameplay are that you begin with a hand of three cards from your deck. On your turn, you draw a card then play a card.

Standard card effects are to deal damage, block damage, draw a card, play an extra card, and recover a hit point, which each card typically having from one to three of these effects. Non-standard effects, unique to each deck, allow you to steal defences, cause discards and draws, and other more interesting effects.

If, through the use of “play an extra card” or other effects, you have no cards in hand, you get to draw two cards.

Each player starts at 10 hit points, and players are eliminated when their hit points reach zero. The one remaining player is the winner!

The interest in the game play comes from cards that allow you to play more than one card per turn. If you can save them up until you can play your entire hand, draw two cards, then keep going, then you feel good. Playing just one card each turn doesn’t feel so good. A card that’s only ability was to play two extra cards? That was gold!

The artwork is nice, the card quality is adequate (although you may want sleeves), but the cardboard tokens used to represent your hit points and damage to your block cards are very flimsy, and I was worried about tearing them as I punched them out. Glass beads would have been preferable.

There’s a lot of these simple and quick brawling games, but this one does its job surprisingly well. It looks good and plays well, though it’s very random. Recommended.