Dice Hospital finds the fun side of sickness

Is there a more perfect game to play in A&E than Dice Hospital?

The dice-roller is the third game from Lab Wars indie studio Alley Cat Games, which made a name for itself by treating games as a way for people to learn about actual real science – helped by the fact that the team includes two doctors, so they know what they’re on about.

Dice Hospital takes the science out of the lab and into the wards, with a combination of dice and worker-placement that brings to mind PC classic Theme Hospital.

The dice represent patients, who arrive in ambulances before being offloaded into the various wards of a player’s hospital board, made up of different hexes representing everything from the trauma unit to intensive care with great isometric artwork from Sabrina Miramon, who previously illustrated Quadropolis and the beautiful Photosynthesis.

Once the patients are where they need to be, nurse meeples are placed on the spaces to progress them towards being cured and discharged from the hospital.

As the game goes on, players can upgrade their hospitals and even choose to play with random events for an extra challenge. A solo mode uses medical report cards to offer challenges that require specific combinations of healed patients to complete.

We checked out a prototype of the game at the UK Games Expo and really liked what we saw even in a rudimentary form, so we’ll be very interested to try out the finished game and see if it holds up to the promising theme and interesting use of dice drafting.

The standard game is £36 (plus £6 postage) on Kickstarter, with a £59 deluxe version adding in 3D ambulances, a themed dice tower and a mini expansion with extra hexes and cards.

The Dice Hospital Kickstarter has already made £41,500 on its initial £12,750 target, so the game is well on its way to a release next August.