Dice Hospital

Dice Hospital puts you in charge of your very own growing clinic! Here, the patients take the form of dice (come on, you’d guessed that already!). The aim of Dice Hospital is to welcome these ‘patients’ into your hospital, where you then try to heal them. There’s an element of dice drafting to this, from co-designers Stan Kordonskiy and Mike Nudd.

In Dice Hospital you each start with a default hospital set-up, which comprises of a series of hex tiles. You have waiting rooms for dice to, erm, wait in, and a bunch of rooms for healing patients in various ways. You also start with some nurse meeples and an asymmetrical Specialist card. This provides a corresponding medical meeple of some kind. You also have three dice already in your waiting rooms.

The higher the pip value, the closer the ‘patients’ are to reaching full health! Likewise, the lower the pip-value? Those patients are in severe trouble! If you can discharge patients – when they’re go above a ‘6’ – you can earn points. When a die is at ‘1’ and goes below that, the patient dies and you lose points.

Rounds consist of drafting an ambulance full of dice/patients. You also take on either a new hospital room (hex tile) or another Specialist (getting a new worker). In no time at all, your dice hospitals become modular, in an engine-building fashion. Once everyone’s drafted, then everyone tries to work medical miracles and heal their dice! Some staff members are better suited to treating different kinds of patients. Staff come in red, yellow and green, and so do the patients (red, yellow, and green dice). Will your staff meeples save the day in a worker placement manner? Will your shiny new clinics speed up recovery times? How will you spend your action points?

Dice Hospital is one of the most popular titles from publisher Alleycat Games.