Card Game Review: Dungeon Mayhem: Monster Madness

I previously reviewed both Dungeon Mayhem as well as its expansion, Battle for Baldur’s Gate, and now I bring you the best expansion yet: Monster Madness.

Monster Madness brings you six new characters to play, along with rules for playing with 5-6 players and a fantastic big box that will hold everything that has come out for Dungeon Mayhem thus far.

While the previous two sets had heroes for you to play, Monster Madness’s characters are all monsters, presented in brilliant ways. Mimi LeChaise, a mimic shaped like a chair, Lord Cinderpuff, a red dragon dressed like Mr. Moneybags, Blorp, a gelatinous cube who just wants to give hugs, Dr. Tentaculous, a mind flayer psychotherapist, Delilah Deathray, a beholder beauty queen, and of course, everyone’s favorite, Hoots McGoots, a owlbear circus performer.

I’m not going to go into the mechanics of the game, since you can see those in my previous reviews. With this expansion, I wanted to look at all the accoutrements around it.

Once again, each of these characters plays very different, matching their distinct personalities. The red dragon is very defensive, piling up gold and armies of lawyers in front of him to defend against incoming attacks before unleashing his dragonfire on everyone. The Mind Flayer is able to take cards from everyone’s discard pile and use them himself as he digs into your past. Blorp can bypass armor as he hugs you. Delilah’s charm ray can let her choose the targets of all attack cards for the next turn. I really love the way they’re all distinctly unique decks. They all really show off how flexible the system is for something so mechanically simple.

The box is a standalone expansion, meaning you don’t need the other sets to play. It’s fully playable out of the box, but you’re gonna end up with a lot of empty space, as the box is large enough to hold all previous sets, and has dividers for them all. I would have liked to see a few slots for future expansions, because if anything else comes out for it, you’re gonna need to pull out multiple boxes like you did before.

The large box perfectly holds everything inside, though. You can easily see the different characters and identify what you want to play. There is also a box to hold all your tokens inside as well.

As you can tell, I really love this one. If you’re going in fresh without having picked up any Dungeon Mayhem at all, I’d start with this box, then move onto picking up the other two. Dungeon Mayhem: Monster Madness is available today at your FLGS or online.

Wizards of the Coast sent a copy of Dungeon Mayhem: Monster Madness to Dice Monkey for review.