Become the world’s fastest detective in 5-Minute Mystery

Attempt to solve crimes in record time with the newly-announced entry to the 5-Minute series, 5-Minute Mystery.

5-Minute Mystery is a co-operative game for one to five players in which everyone must work together to figure out whodunnit in under 5 minutes. Each game revolves around solving a theft committed within the Museum of Everything by one of the possible animal suspects, whose identity must be determined by collecting the right clues and narrowing down possible options.

At the start of each game you’ll choose your case card which will determine the level of challenge you and your friends will face, as some case cards have unique rules that will ramp up the difficulty. Next you’ll randomly select your culprit tile from the available stack, whose other side contains your guilty party.

During the game players work together to find a variety of symbols hidden within the images printed on the museum room cards, whilst another player takes control of the codex. The codex is a tool that players can use to remember which symbols they’ve successfully located on which card, so that they can check if they’re right whenever they eventually flip a room card.

If players are right then they can take a clue tile from the top of the stack and reveal what knowledge it contains about their suspect. If the barcode on the side matches one on the active culprit tile, then the current suspect does hold that particular clue, and if not, then they don’t. For example, if the clue tile is a pearl necklace and the barcode directly matches with the culprit tile, then players can assume that the wrong-doer in play does have said necklace.

Once this information has been revealed then each player eliminates the suspect cards in their hands that don’t match the clues they have, thereby narrowing down the potential culprits. This whole process then repeats until players have reduced their suspects down to one, leaving them to accuse the remaining character.

As with Wiggles 3D’s previous game 5-Minute Dungeon, 5-Minute Mystery will also have a free app that players can download and use alongside the game. 5-Minute Mystery can be played without the app, but using it does provide an accurate way of timing the game and some fun little voice-over to add atmosphere as well.

The game is currently up on Kickstarter until December 19th with the base pledge amount (around £21) getting you a standard copy of the game. As of yet, there has been no mention of retail version of 5-Minute Mystery.