Critical Care: The Game

About the game

Critical Care: The Game lets you bring all of the intensity and teamwork of the ICU to life on your kitchen table. Designed by ICU doctors Lakshman Swamy, MD and Vincent Chan, MD, the Critical Care is based in real medicine but accessible for a broad audience. Featuring: Cooperative gameplay for 1-4 players taking on the role of ICU doctors; discharge all of your patients to win, but beware the threat of a Code Blue that can end the game for everyone! No medical knowledge required- but each of over 300 unique cards has a plain-English description of real ICU medicine Select from 8 unique patients, each with their own backstory, and 25 ICU Diagnoses such as Sepsis; patients are at risk for 50 unique Complications, allowing for endless replay value as the game builds on these combinations Heal patients and recover with over 100 unique Therapy cards, everything from potent medications to invasive procedures Bring in additional expertise with over 25 unique Specialists like the Cardiologist or Pharmacist to turn the tide in your favor Watch out - your pager may randomly go off during your shift. A 2am consult from the Emergency Room can throw off your best plans! Gameplay Each day in the ICU, the game's engine tries to add Injury and Crisis tokens to patients and players race to remove these tokens. Each patient can sustain Injury to five different systems: brain, heart, lung, blood, and inflammation. In addition, each patient has a Crisis track representing the intangibles of being sick in the hospital: how much the patient is suffering and how close they are to death. As Crisis tokens accumulate, patients are more likely to develop complications. If all available slots for injury tokens or the Crisis Track are filled, the patient undergoes a Code Blue and the team has a chance to work together to save the patient or else the game is lost. This continues for 7 days until one of the game end criteria are met; 1. All patients are cured by removing all of the injury tokens from the Patient Chart representing stabilization and transfer out of the ICU (win) OR 2. Patients have their Goals of Care advanced to the end of the track representing hospice (win). If your patients survive until the end of Day Seven without transfer out of the ICU or transfer to hospice, the game is a draw. If any patient dies from a Code Blue, everyone loses. —description from the publisher