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We Got Played #1: Dice Hospital!
51 Plays4 months ago
Today on We Got Played, we discuss one of the more acclaimed games on our unplayed shelf: Dice Hospital! Coming out in 2018 and winning two awards at the 2019 UK Games Expo, it's a game where meeples treat sick dice! Will this hospital cure our boredom, or will we leave showing a lower pip than when we started? Find out on this episode of WE GOT PLAYED!
(Music used from DavidSmith2024 via Pixabay)
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Transcript
Intro
Introduction and Game Overview
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello everybody and welcome to We Got Played. This is Isaac. And I'm Jesse. And today, what did we get played? ah Today we got played Dice Hospital.
00:00:29
Speaker
The Dice Hospital. This is a dice placement game. It's for one to four players, takes 45 to 90 minutes, and it was designed by Stanislav Kordonski and Mike Nudd, released by Alley Cat Games.
00:00:46
Speaker
This game has lots and lots of recognition. It's got a Dice Tower seal of approval. It won the yeah UK Games Expo Award in 2019, the People's Choice Award as well.
00:00:57
Speaker
ah from the UK Games Expo for New Dice Game. And we were pretty excited about trying it out. Yeah, totally. I mean, it has a sort of distinct art style, seeing it kind of pops out on a shelf. And with all those accolades, it felt like it was worth a play at least once to figure out maybe this is the new thing.
00:01:19
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's 2024. So it was the new thing five years ago, but was it the new thing five years ago? It's also 2025. That's even worse. My goodness.
00:01:29
Speaker
Well, yeah. So, you know, we're on a journey to play a lot, a lot, a lot of unplayed games. We've got about 100 on the shelf over here, and Dice Hospital seemed like a a good thing to try out.
Gameplay Mechanics
00:01:40
Speaker
And the concept of this game pretty straightforward.
00:01:44
Speaker
You've got dice representing patients. ah The dice are going to get rolled, and the healthiest patients are the highest numbers, the sickest patients are the lowest numbers.
00:01:55
Speaker
And you're going to draft these dice into your hospital, into the wards in your hospital. And then you're going to use your nurses and your doctors and the different wings of your hospital to treat the dice, to treat the patients, trying to get them up to over six, at which point they get discharged. And discharging patients is worth points.
00:02:17
Speaker
ah Discharging many patients in one turn is worth even more points. And after, i think it's eight rounds, whoever has the most points wins. If you aren't able to treat all your patients and you get new patients in you don't have room, some of your patients will unfortunately ah die and go to the morgue where they will score negative victory points for you, which is maybe a...
00:02:42
Speaker
A little flippant.
00:02:45
Speaker
But that's basically Dice Hospital. You're drafting the dice pools and then you're drafting the ah upgrades, whether that's the hospital upgrades, the wards that let you ah treat dice differently, or the specialists themselves, which provide you the workers to activate the wards and which may have themselves a special ability.
00:03:04
Speaker
So that's kind of the very, very quick how to play Dice Hospital. We left out quite a lot. Please don't play Dice Hospital without reading the rules if this is all you've listened to. ah But with that, ah quickly, Jesse, what did you think of Dice Hospital in terms of complexity and rules and just how easy was it to get played?
Rulebook Clarity Issues
00:03:24
Speaker
It is, I feel like I understood it after a ah little bit. The rulebook itself begs a lot of questions. It gives you some of the basic rules. It tells you what all the components do. But I found myself having a lot of clarifying questions that the rulebook was not so clear on.
00:03:41
Speaker
um But understanding all those rules and those little complexities, it was actually fairly straightforward. Yeah, it's so straightforward that some of the ah issues that we had with the rulebook were kind of unfortunate.
00:03:56
Speaker
I'll give you a simple example. And, you know, longtime listeners will know that this is a bugbear of mine and that I really get driven crazy by this. But... There is a dice drafting phase in which ah groups of dice are placed on ambulances, and there's one more ambulance than the number of players.
00:04:14
Speaker
At the conclusion of that draft, there will be one ambulance left with three dice on it. The rules the dead themselves don't specify what to do with the dice on that ambulance.
00:04:26
Speaker
You've got to go to the FAC. And the FAC clarifies that these dice are thrown back into the dice bag. And this is the kind of thing that just to me feels like you you're going to get an incomplete if I'm the greater.
00:04:37
Speaker
Yeah. Right. Because you didn't tell me how to operate the game. You didn't give me all of the steps that I needed to get through each phase and make the game go. You hid some part of that in a fact.
00:04:49
Speaker
And I'll tell you what, guys, you know why that's a frequently asked question? Exactly. If you'd put it in the main rules, nobody would be asking. And that that's one of the problems that I have with the rulebook is that it feels like you need a lot of common board gaming sense in order to kind of fill in all the things that the rulebook doesn't tell you to do. It tells you how to play the game, but not how to operate it, really.
00:05:11
Speaker
Yeah, well said. Okay, so I think we both came out of that feeling similarly. It's not a complicated game, um but the rules are weird. i also ah want to add that we played with the administrator rules.
00:05:23
Speaker
This is again a bizarre thing. So in the setup, the game mentions that if you're playing with the optional rule of administrators, you should give people two administrator cards, and then they should pick one and whatever.
00:05:35
Speaker
The rulebook does not go on to indicate anything. The word administrator does not appear in the body of the rules. All the way at the end in the card index, which, by the way, thank you.
00:05:48
Speaker
yeah Fantastic card index. But all the way in the card index, it tells you what the administrator powers are. doesn't specify anything. What you do with these cards, do you keep them? Do you discard them after use? Are they permanent?
00:06:02
Speaker
But if you look up in the glossary, which is not the card index, it's a separate you know piece of, ah what you call it, a codicil, a post yeah rules. like I don't know what they were thinking. It's an appendix. It's an appendix.
00:06:17
Speaker
um So in the glossary, they define administrator cards. I mean, it's honestly, we're probably going down a rabbit hole here.
00:06:27
Speaker
Long time listeners may be familiar with that. But here's the glossary. the This has 12 items in it. Administrator, a card drawn at the start of the game, which impacts your play strategy.
00:06:41
Speaker
That, my friends, is the last word on the administrator cards. Which, by the way, were all terrible. I like just terrible. But and okay, so fine. So relatively simple game.
Strategy and Player Incentives
00:06:52
Speaker
um You're your ostensibly going to choose ah which dice you want. But the way in which the dice are distributed is such that, you know, we played two players, so there's three ambulances.
00:07:04
Speaker
The sickest patients, the ones that you're going to to the most effort to cure, are in the first ambulance and then the last ambulance number three has the healthiest patients. um Now, there's really no reason to want to treat sicker patients. Yeah, because they don't earn you more points. They just take more effort. They eat up more of your actions.
00:07:28
Speaker
I don't do anything more. Right. Yeah. It's just longer to get rid of them. So what does the game do to make you take the ambulance with sicker patients instead of just the healthiest ones?
00:07:39
Speaker
Essentially, the way that they incentivize you is by giving you an extra blood bag, which is a token that you can use to heal one of your patients by one pip at any point.
00:07:52
Speaker
or to change that cube's color a different color, which may help because there are powers like ah if you have ah a yellow patients in Ascending Run, you can cure you can treat all of them by one step, or three of them, or whatever it is. So there are reasons why you might want to change colors. Certain specialists only we treat certain colors.
00:08:13
Speaker
But yeah, so it gives you the blood bag. And the second thing is that the patient the the player who selects the lowest-ranked ambulance, the one with the sickest patients, gets to go first. And going first fundamentally only means that in the second draft, where you draft hospital improvements, you get to go first. yeah So first you draft patients.
00:08:35
Speaker
If you draft the sickest patients, you can go first in the draft for improvements. And that's where you either draft, another hex tile to add to your tableau that gives you essentially another form of treatment.
00:08:48
Speaker
And this one typically will let you treat multiple patients at once. so Some condition, oh, treat three patients who are one through three in PIP value, or treat two red patients, or treat three yellow patients if their numbers are in a row, or you know stuff like that, versus the ah personnel upgrades, which are acquire another meeple and you put the meeples onto the rooms, onto these hexes to activate them.
00:09:17
Speaker
And then they may also have a special power. Oh, you treated a red patient. You get to treat another red patient. Oh, you treated a green patient, get to increase their pips by two instead of one, that, that kind of thing. So distinct from the rooms, but not,
00:09:30
Speaker
Terribly distinct. Right. They're similar. They're definitely very similar. So that's, and that really, by the way, that's all the interaction there is in the game. That's all the player interaction. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. It's just the drafting and the deciding who goes first.
00:09:43
Speaker
After that, it's multiplayer solitaire. It's not even in turn order. You just assign all of your workers. You treat all of your patients. Any patients who didn't get treated become sicker. Any patients who exceeded six are discharged.
00:09:57
Speaker
Score points for discharge, reset your board, do it again eight times. So what do you think of the core puzzle? I thought it was interesting at a certain point.
00:10:09
Speaker
ah There becomes a point around near the end of the game, like turn five, six, where you end up having a lot of patients and it's about having to figure out how to cure all of them without neglecting any.
00:10:21
Speaker
And also how to discharge the most hospitals on one or the most patients on one turn. So there's a balancing act of discharging patients, but not too many patients that you don't score the maximum points.
00:10:32
Speaker
So it's about getting every patient to six, essentially, so that you can discharge them all on the next turn. And I thought that was very interesting, but I thought it was difficult to plan in terms of multi-turn combos.
00:10:47
Speaker
So that part of the puzzle, I feel like, was kind of lost on me, but the turn itself is interesting. Yeah, i agree. There's an interesting puzzle in figuring out how to maximize...
00:11:00
Speaker
the amount of healing you can do. How many, i mean, you know, there's a theme here, I guess, but like fundamentally you're trying to make dice go to seven. And every meeple that you have has some ability to add points to certain dice and you're trying to match it up so that you're maximizing how many cure points you can kind of get out into the world.
00:11:20
Speaker
And that's a fine puzzle. It's not an especially complicated puzzle. It's appropriate for the weight of this game. This is looking to be a family, you know, light Euro kind of game. It's not even mid-weight.
00:11:34
Speaker
So I don't i don't mind um um mind that piece of it. It's not, you don't feel super clever any point. You don't feel super powerful at any point.
00:11:46
Speaker
And this issue of curing a lot of patients at once is I think where I started to bump up against the edges of the room where I started to feel a little bit like dissatisfied with the play because The way that you score lots of points is by discharging many patients at once. Right.
00:12:06
Speaker
So after the first two turns, you and I discharged an equal number of patients. Yeah. But you were ahead of me in points because you discharged all of them on turn two, whereas I discharged some on turn one and some on turn two. Yeah.
00:12:19
Speaker
So you got a higher score because of that discharging all at once. Once you get that, you're like, oh okay. So it's it's not exactly a push-your-luck game, but it has a similar feel of trying to like get everything up to the brink and then have your big turn.
00:12:33
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Which doesn't feel like hospitals.
00:12:39
Speaker
Like, I get it. I almost feel like this game didn't wasn't sure whether it was, oh, human patients are being represented by dice, or whether it was, let's play pretend, dice are sick and we must cure them. Right, yeah.
00:12:57
Speaker
It didn't land on one or the other. i feel like if it had landed on the latter, it would have been okay for the scoring to incentivize curing lots of them at once, there is some sense of like getting a lot of dice at once in your hand is fun and like, right maybe that would have felt better, but With the theme as it is, it just feels like you're intentionally keeping patients around because it's better for you if they like get discharged next week.
00:13:26
Speaker
I feel that in the art as well because all of the specialist art is humans. They're stylized humans. But all of the ward art, like all of the art for the different hexes, has like dice hidden in them.
00:13:39
Speaker
yes So it's like i the the theming isn't super cohesive in terms of we're doing one thing all throughout, you know? And so I definitely agree with you there in terms of the yeah little disjointedness of how the game is themed versus how it's played.
00:13:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the game makes a stand, right? The game says that the patients are represented by dice. Oh, it does. I didn't catch that part of the rulebook. Yeah, well, it does say that.
00:14:09
Speaker
But, you know, um i think I think that was a bit of a miss. But because of that incoherence between what the game is telling you is good to do based on its scoring system versus what the theme is telling you you should do. Right.
00:14:27
Speaker
you know me I don't know. are you Are you really insurance companies who are trying to keep patients in the hospital so that you can bill? It's not entirely clear to me. No, because insurance companies would want you out. it's Are you a hospital administrator? I feel like you are. You're trying to keep your beds at close to maximum capacity because they don't ah like they don't give you money if they're not filled.
00:14:48
Speaker
Right. But like, it makes you feel like there would be an expansion here, which is like the mugger expansion where your job is to go injure a bunch of patients to drive them through the front end of the hospital. my god It's, it's, it's kind of bizarre that, you know, the theme, i don't know that that worked.
Game Components Analysis
00:15:04
Speaker
the The other thing that I wanted to complain about extensively, although we are running short on time, so I don't know how extensive it'll be. But one thing I wanted to complain about was the administrator cards, which,
00:15:15
Speaker
The game has comes with two modules. There's the events module, which we didn't play with, which is literally like a textbook example of things to avoid when you're designing, which is, oh, hey here's random events that can happen for no apparent reason, and the game is just fine without them.
00:15:30
Speaker
Is it? i mean, you know, you could say it adds some texture. You could say it puts people in different situations. I don't know. i kind of feel like good design drives all of that into the core system.
00:15:43
Speaker
Your core system is dice drafting. Right. So drive crazy stuff into the dice drafting. Maybe if you draft something of a certain value that creates an event, maybe there's a a fourth kind of die that is, you know, the the the critical care patient. but I don't know, but this like I designed this engine and then flip a card also and see what happens.
00:16:05
Speaker
It's, for me, not the most elegant kind of design system, and we didn't play with it. i didn't Honestly, I did not even look at the events to see what they did. What we did choose to play with is the administrators on my general philosophy that the best time to learn the expansion to a game is the first time you play the game. Because whatever, I'm already in it for the rules teach. Fine, let's learn all the rules.
00:16:28
Speaker
The administrator cards basically fall into one of two categories. There's ah one that says, if you treated um two patients of particular color, you get an extra point this turn. If you discharge them rather. right And then there's a couple of others that are distinct from that. They're like, oh, did you do more patients than anybody else?
00:16:53
Speaker
ah Then you get a point. And then there's three more that are like, oh, One time, you can ignore a neglected patient in a red, or another one is in yellow, or another is in green.
00:17:04
Speaker
So these are, like, way different vectors. Yeah. One of them is giving you a power, like a one-time power in the game, maybe? I don't know. It's really hard to say, because the rules don't say anything about it. But it feels like a constant effect.
00:17:19
Speaker
Yeah, but it just, it says, one neglected patient. I guess it doesn't deteriorate this round, but is that true of every round? Did I spend the card, or just, I permanently... And also, isn't that weird that like the power of my hospital administrator is to take a neglected patient and prevent them from getting sicker?
00:17:35
Speaker
It doesn't feel like an administrator power that feels like a ah doctor or a nurse power. yeah like just an extra doctor. thing Right, like getting an extra point for discharging two green patients. That makes sense.
00:17:47
Speaker
don't know. What are the colors of the dice? Well, they're different, like... areas, I guess. There's specialties, right? Like the red is cardiac, right? The the red is like organ damage because it's like red, the the default red is critical care.
00:18:02
Speaker
I guess the red the red specialists are the surgeon the anesthetist. Yeah, yeah. So red is like operations. Green is pharmacist and virologist. Yeah, and that makes sense. It's like medicine. It's allergies and endology and ENT, ear, nose, throat.
00:18:20
Speaker
And then yellow is fluids, hematologist, and urologist. Well, I'm just thinking other assorted specialists. But it's renal and orthopedics. Yeah, that's right. Oh, I sprained my liver.
00:18:32
Speaker
what I don't. Yeah, I know. Renal's kidney. So get me in the comments. That's fine. um Yeah. So so that was a little bit bizarre. And then the administrators giving you more points for, like, releasing those patients or and this power. And and Jesse, you had this power. and Yeah. why I'm sort of banging a gong on it is. Yeah.
00:18:54
Speaker
ah the You get point you got a point for treating more patients, discharging more patients than any other player. Now, number one, any power that does this, I have a huge problem with in a game that supports simultaneous play. yeah
00:19:13
Speaker
Well, how many patients are you treating this turn, Jesse? Exactly. I don't want to tell you. yeah
00:19:19
Speaker
Right.
Game Evaluation and Rating
00:19:20
Speaker
So you immediately like put the brakes on the game and create this like staring competition. It does. Yeah. stand off And there was a point at the end of the game where ah you were deciding which hospital to draft.
00:19:32
Speaker
And it was just a solid 10 minutes of working out your entire turn in advance, which is not fun before the turn and probably also not fun during the turn.
00:19:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's a major issue with this kind of game where because you have to make the decision of what to draft up front, but essentially only one other thing will change, you'll get one additional improvement of some kind, one additional upgrade.
00:19:58
Speaker
you not only do you have to plan your whole turn, you actually have to plan possibly two or three variations on your turn. yeah If I do get this specialist, but if I don't, then what will I do and which one works out? So you end up just playing the whole game in your head before you make that draft.
00:20:14
Speaker
Then you draft, then you forget what you decided, then you replay the whole game. And the puzzle is not like good enough to play twice. You what mean? It's not that exciting. yeah so So that was annoying. And then add to that, well, are you going to heal more patients than I'm going to heal? Because if so, I might do things differently to deny you the points. or Oh, and by the way, what happens in the case of a tie?
00:20:34
Speaker
Right. it's It's, it says you have to have more than the other person in terms of like, says you have to have healed the most patients. Right. The the most. Right. And so we decided in a tie that ah you don't get the points and the forum on BGG seems to corroborate that, but how reliable is that? Who knows?
00:20:55
Speaker
Yeah, BoardGameGeek agreed. I didn't check to see if it was the designer or maybe with the rulebook editor. It was someone who claimed that they had a conversation with the designer. Ah, right, great. So third-hand knowledge. Right.
00:21:09
Speaker
So, you know, think that... One of the um things that arises out of playing a game like this is that you see that some of the details haven't been taken care of.
00:21:21
Speaker
Yeah. Which suggests either insufficient playtesting or a disconnect between the designer and then the rulebook editor ah and possibly the developer.
00:21:34
Speaker
um I don't know what the real answer here is. i can speculate. i can you know but I don't know the story behind this. But even if all those things were fixed and polished and everything was perfect, I think we ended with a game that was kind of mid- Yeah.
00:21:50
Speaker
It's fine. I don't know why I would play it in a world in which there are so, so, so many great games, but I'm shocked because this game is rated in the top 1,000 on BoardGameGeek, and um it's not like it's so old that it's benefiting from some lowered expectations. Right. We just said it's 2019. Yeah.
00:22:08
Speaker
And um so, and I don't know, maybe it's better at three or four players, but it's not like there's more player interactions. it's the same draft. You're just choosing from a couple more options because it's N plus one is the number of options you put out, one more for each player. So...
00:22:23
Speaker
i I was pretty underwhelmed. I was as well with this one. Yeah, I'm not sure ah that this is one that I would revisit.
00:22:35
Speaker
But I wouldn't be upset should I have to revisit. If I was playing at a convention and someone wanted to play this game, it's not like I would walk away from the table. This is a perfectly fine experience. Yeah, it's perfectly fine.
00:22:46
Speaker
i would play it with folks who aren't going to have a lot of analysis paralysis. yeah I understand there's some expansions. We didn't have those. We didn't play with those. ah Maybe they they do something more. But I guess where I want to end is just to ask...
00:23:01
Speaker
Okay, the gameplay being what it is, does the game have anything to say about its setting? Is the game in any way a piece of art in that sense? Is it telling us something about the ah world that we inhabit through its gameplay lens?
00:23:19
Speaker
maybe that's why ah you don't that's why Maybe that's why you score more when you discharge put ah patients immediately. that Maybe that's what the commentary is. as they're They're trying to keep you in the hospital for as long as possible because that's how they score.
00:23:33
Speaker
Well, it's it's interesting, right? Because like in triage, you you have different rules based on the situation that you're in. But typically ah what you try and do in triage is say identify the patients that can be saved given the resources available.
00:23:50
Speaker
Right. And everybody else you make comfortable um And I don't, I didn't feel like I was doing much triage at all. I didn't feel like i and the game doesn't incentivize. The game does not incentivize treating sick patients.
00:24:06
Speaker
It incentivizes acquiring patients who are as healthy as possible. Yeah. But like, okay, that could be a rye and sardonic take. That could be a a black irony. Yeah.
00:24:18
Speaker
Yeah. But I don't know. I've got like these cartoonish smiling face doctors on the front. And like there's there's no there's no cynicism in the game that I can detect whatsoever.
00:24:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. It's very light and cartoony. You know, and that's why I almost want it to be that we're curing sick dice. Right. Yeah. It feels like it would fix that. It feels like it would fit that.
00:24:41
Speaker
Yeah. And, you know, I also didn't get any sense of how sick you are as a roll of the dice. Like I'm looking for any kind of commentary for any deeper meaning. And honestly, ah I'm not finding it.
00:24:54
Speaker
I'm not finding it. I don't think this game has a lot to say about hospitals or sickness or death or recovery um or the insurance industry or how care is apportioned or how hospitals are built or anything.
00:25:09
Speaker
it All it really has to say is pick three dice. yeah Any three dice, but probably the highest ones. Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. So do you want to end by rating it out of, i don't know, seven?
00:25:25
Speaker
ah Well, I think it's dice, so we should rate it out of six. Ooh, yeah. One is the sickest. yeah Six is the healthiest.
00:25:36
Speaker
ah Solid three. Yeah, it's a three. I mean, I don't, you know, we haven't decided on a formal rating system. What I would what i would say is I do feel like we got played. Yeah. we We could have played raw.
00:25:48
Speaker
We could have played. We should play raw. Let's just play raw. Yeah. All right, folks, we're going to go play raw. Thanks for listening to We Got Played. Thank you. you next time.