3 Minute Heroes

3 Minute Heroes is a real-time strategy game that combines tower defense, deck building and roguelike elements. You place units on the field and play cards to stop waves of monsters and protect your home for 3 minutes at a time.

Heroes and cards

Choose a hero and two others to join your team. The game has 20 heroes, each with its own skill and cards; your heroes’ combination changes your play style. Combining triple hero cards makes your heroes cooler. The Warrior’s Training Journal shows each hero’s specialty.

There are over 400 cards. The cards available in a run are limited to those associated with your selected heroes, so you do not need to know every card. Hard mode, The Great Invasion, also has cards that appear only there.

Rounds and rewards

The game has 12 rounds, each lasting 3 minutes. Across them, you face dozens of monsters and bosses from six factions: slimes, goblins, ghosts, golems, demons and dragons. Enemies have varied attack patterns, and at the end of each round you choose one of three rewards to improve your deck.

Customize your deck

You can add keywords to cards using “Remodel a card.” For example, Combo repeats the number of times a card was played during the current round, while Guardian makes the card’s targets Invincible. There are 20 keywords in total.

Enemies drop loot based on the heroes you chose. Click loot to activate its effects. “Adjust loots” lets you add new loot or increase the drop rate of existing loot; there are 20 loot types.

Quests and arena

For each round, the AI tracks your three most frequent actions. The quest system has 20 conditions and 60 rewards: when a condition is met, its reward effects trigger automatically. For example, a deck with strong magic damage might pursue the condition “When you kill enemies with magic damage.”

Arena is an asynchronous auto-battler mode where you fight other players using the game’s systems. You can combine over 50 synergies and more than 100 arena quest effects as you aim for the highest rank.

Extreme stages and heroes

There are 10 Extreme Stages, each with five altars. Altars appear at random and apply effects for 30 seconds, such as stunning all heroes or making enemies appear at triple the rate. As the stage level rises, altars accumulate, reaching a total of 50 in stage 10.

You can unlock hero stories by meeting conditions, such as unlocking every hero or clearing stage 5 of The Great Invasion. Clearing rounds also earns clover, which you can spend to upgrade heroes and continue with stronger characters.