Work Together to Save Lives in the ICU Unit in Critical Care: The Game
Image: Zentensivist Games
As a nurse anaesthetist, it is difficult for me to not get excited about Critical Care: The Game a cooperative game for 1 - 4 players designed by Omari Akil and Dr. Lakshman Swamy whose experiences as a pulmonary and critical care physician serves as the inspiration for the game.
“The game is played over a week: seven Days in the ICU. Each Day is broken up into several phases. First, Rounding and Complications happen simultaneously for all players; during Rounding, any cards already on the patient take effect, adding or removing Injury and Crisis. Then, Complications are drawn for each patient; the injury they have already sustained determines what Complications they get, just like in real life! After Rounding and Complications, players take individual turns called Shifts.
During each Shift, a player draws and resolves a Pager card and then draws up to 7 Therapy cards and plays up to 12 hours of Therapies. Pager cards represent real life in the hospital, such as when nursing is short-staffed or the CT scanner breaks down. Therapy cards have beneficial effects for patients, often removing Injury or Crisis tokens. Many instantly remove Injury/Crisis; tokens removed this way are added to your experience pool, which may be used for a variety of purposes including bringing in consulting Specialists in the next phase. In the Specialist Phase, players pool experience tokens to consult Specialists and bring them into the ICU. Specialists have active and passive abilities to bend the rules in your favor; for example, the Surgeon prevents complications from invasive procedures. After the Specialist phase, the Day counter is advanced and the phases repeat, starting with Rounding, until either all patients are cured & discharged from the ICU (win), patients survive until the end of Day Seven (win), or any patient dies (lose).” - description by the publisher
Image: Zentensivist Games
At the time of writing, the Kickstarter campaign for Critical Care: The Game has 27 days to go with an estimated delivery date of May 2022.
Source: Kickstarter
