A Trip to the Dice C U

Sometimes, a board game's name is evocative and mysterious. Other times, a game tells you exactly what it is in the name. Guess which category Dice Hospital falls in?

Players each assume control of a hospital, trying to manage the care of their dice patients. Each round, a number of ambulances arrives (one more than the number of players), each carrying three dice. Dice are rolled to fill the ambulances, but with several caveats -- 1s and 6s are re-rolled, and then dice are placed three to an ambulance in ascending order.

Players then draft which ambulance of three dice they'll take in to their hospital before proceeding to use tokens to perform a number of actions. The goal is to "heal" your dice by raising their values to "7" or more, thus discharging them from the hospital. Different "rooms" in your hospital can each be used once per round, each one with a different specialty. Dice come in three colors, and some rooms can only treat a particular color. Other rooms treat dice only of certain values, or certain groups like pairs, sets, and runs.

Each round, you draft either a new room for your hospital, or a specialist token that can grant you an extra action with special benefits. This drafting is done in order by the ambulances chosen earlier in the round; take on a bunch of particularly dire patients, and you will get to pick your upgrade before anyone else.

You only have 12 "beds" for dice in your hospital, so you need to discharge patients at least as fast as you're taking them in each round; if you don't have room for an incoming die, then one of your existing dice dies. (Heh. Dies.) That's negative points at the end of the game. But scoring well requires a different kind of coordination -- the more dice you discharge successfully from your hospital in the same turn, the more points that's worth. (Because, as we all know, hospitals work hard to send as many people out the door at one time as they can. For the photo op.)

I kid there a bit on the flavor, because it all makes a fun sort of sense aside from that one wrinkle. Illustrations on your hospital board show dice going into MRI machines, being hooked up to contraptions... or lying "dead" in your morgue. It's all cute.

The game itself? Not bad. It's pretty smooth and fast. Once everyone has drafted ambulances and upgrades for a round, they can actually take actions in their hospitals simultaneously (assuming everyone understands the rules). You get the thrill of figuring out a killer combo without the grind of waiting for every opponent in sequence to do execute theirs.

While I admittedly haven't played enough yet to know for sure, though, I'm not convinced the drafting of new rooms and specialists is a major part of the strategy here. The way the scoring works, and the strict 8 rounds of play, basically means you're working to send two, maybe three, big groups of dice out the door in a single go. That basically means that you may have a plan for your dice now, but you can't know what dice you'll have later. Being asked to think on the fly is great, but the rooms/specialists you take now may not be useful to you later. And the ones you get "stuck" with now may turn out to be great later. I'm just not sure chasing an early draft pick in this game pays off.

There's also a optional variant we haven't played yet, that involved a random event each round shaking things up for the players. I don't know if more randomness would help or hurt the game, but I'm open to trying.

I suppose I'd give Dice Hospital a B? Ish? It didn't blow me away, but it's reasonably breezy fun that's worth a few more plays.