5-Minute One Piece
review by Alapai
5-Minute One Piece is a fast-paced cooperative card game for 2-6 players made by Wiggles 3D that takes place in real time, generally in just 5 minutes. In it, you take the roles of the Straw Hat Pirates as they set off from the East Blue into the Grand Line.
The 5 location decks representing the 5 story arcs of season 2
5-Minute One Piece is based off of Wiggles 3D’s previous 5-Minute games like 5-Minute Dungeon or 5-Minute Marvel, but does a few things uniquely as well. 5-Minute One Piece is based off of season 2 of Netflix’s Live Action One Piece and features art, locations and characters from the show. Each person starts by choosing a Straw Hat from the first 6 Straw Hats (Luffy, Zoro, Nami, Usopp, Sanji or Chopper) and taking their character mat and character deck. Next, you choose one of the locations from the show (Loguetown, Twin Cape, Whiskey Peak, Little Garden or Drum Island), take out the Boss card from the deck, shuffle the rest of the deck and place the Boss on the bottom of the deck. When you are ready, you start a timer based on the number of players and chosen difficulty (less players/easier difficulty = more time, more players/harder difficulty = less time), reveal the top card of the location deck and start. Each card in the location deck will either be an ally that can help you out later or a card you have to deal with. Card you deal with will have a number of Challenge cards you have to complete to defeat them and move past them. Challenge cards will feature 4 symbols on them that have to be played in the correct order on the Going Merry in order to complete them. Once you’ve completed enough Challenge cards to defeat the current card, you put the location card and Challenge cards needed to defeat it aside and flip the next card from the location deck. At the very bottom of each deck is the Boss which is the toughest card to defeat in any given deck. If you can defeat the Boss before time runs out, you win!
Buggy being defeated by 3 Challenge cards
The Boss of Loguetown, both in gameplay and storywise
Like the previous 5-Minute games, 5-Minute One Piece is very simple, but the difficulty in it comes from the game being done in real time. Instead of being able to consider options and try and optimize gameplay, you have to just quickly play cards in order to try and get through the deck in the proper amount of time. When it comes to cooperative games, I’m not a huge fan of most of them. I’ve had bad experiences playing them in the past, but most of that comes down to them being an experiences where more assertive players take over and I might as well not have been there. 5-Minute One Piece gets around this by limiting time. While an assertive player can try to take over the game and tell everybody what to do, that requires much more discussion of what cards are currently in each player’s hand than what is needed generally.
The Going Merry with 4 slots to play symbol cards
The thing that drew me into the game was the flavor. I am a big One Piece fan and have really enjoyed the live action series as well. 5-Minute One Piece takes season 2 and has it as the setting for the game. Each character has their own deck that has two copies of each of two unique action cards as well as a number of symbol cards. For the most part, they will have 4 each of the five different symbol cards, except for having one more of the symbol they most embody (ie Luffy has Punch, Nami has Coin, etc), but there are also characters that have 6 each of a symbol card, reducing a different card to only 3 each. This makes it so that each character does feel different from the others, while not being so different that you can just rely on a single character to handle specific symbols (ie this Challenge needs Punch, so let the Luffy player play the Punch cards). The locations do have some variety too, with each card featuring the events and characters of that arc, such as fighting Tashigi and Smoker at Loguetown or getting help from Dorry and Brogy at Little Garden.
The 5 different symbol cards
A Luffy action card and Nami action card
As you might expect at this point, I have an issue with the size of the box for the game. Space-wise, it is very similar to the Avatar Beginner Box in that the game itself is just cards, but has large, unnecessary game boards that force the box to be larger. With 5-Minute One Piece, the game comes with a Going Merry board that you are meant to play the action cards on top of. It’s cute, but wholly unnecessary and takes up a ton of space. Instead, I just sleeved up all the cards and put them in a box designed to hold graded cards in their slabs (as the location cards are 70mm x 110mm and are too large for a regular deck box. The smaller cards of the character decks and Challenge cards are stacked on top of each other in the rest of the box. While I can’t use the Going Merry board with my new box, I can fit 5-Minute One Piece in a much smaller amount of space.
The Going Merry's size dictating the box size
The regular box in comparison to my deck box
My deck box containing all the cards in the game
If you are looking for a light, fast-paced, cooperative experience, and especially if you like the live action One Piece show, I recommend 5-Minute One Piece.
5-Minute One Piece is available now from our webstore.
