Dice Hospital is a 2018 game designed by Stan Kardonskiy and Mike Nudd, and published by Alley Cat Games
Dice Hospital is an engine building puzzly-race game for 1 to 4 players, where each player competes to run the most efficient hospital. Choose treatments for your dice patients to reduce the severity of their maladies until they can be safely discharged. Or give up on them and shuffle them off to the morgue.
Is it fun?
Many board games involve a bit of math, a bit of planning ahead, a bit of totting up bonuses and trying to view a strategy from several angles. Dice Hospital includes all of these. Maybe a little too much. “Fun” is so subjective, and occasionally falls into the “I know it when I see it” category. And in the case of Dice Hospital, there wasn’t much for me to see.
I had a lot of fun with it, but this game is very much not for everyone. It is a crunchy, head-down, puzzle race game that asks you to look at a handful of dice and calculate the path forward where the fewest of them die alone (dice plural…get it?). A lot of players will be turned away by the puzzliness of it, and more still by how solitary the gameplay really is.
Do the components/aesthetics improve the experience?
“They’re fine,” as Thom notes, is about the best I can say for the aesthetics and components. Not strictly minimalistic, but the art feels samey. I’m the biggest fan of the dice ambulances, though. Loved that touch. The dice were fine, too, but very fiddly to manage.
They’re fine; no significant complaints. The artwork is a bit bland, perhaps a bit…sterile (I promise I might stop now), which clashes a bit with the colorful dice. I feel like there are some missed opportunities here to lean into the inherent quirkiness of the theme–it’s a normal enough hospital, with normal people doctors, but the patients are all dice? They could have done the art/component design around that more and it would have added a little whimsy to the game.
Does playing the game create an immersive experience?
The vibe is there. The dice were there. If you went into this game expecting to treat dice at a hospital for dice, I’d say that the game delivers. That being said, playing it felt a little too much like my day job (software developer) and not enough like I was managing a hospital. And yet, at times the patient management felt like I was just trying to move dice through the system and not actually care for them. Not sure if this was an accident or social commentary.
Yes, but. Hearkening back to my previous paragraph, this game seems like it should be much sillier than it is, thematically speaking. The fact that patients are dice is not taken advantage of, either by making the whole world dice-based or by making it specifically, thematically, a hospital for sick and injured dice. Oh no! This die’s pips fell off! That one has pip pox, so it has too many pips now! That one was chewed on by a dog! And then build treatments/wards/specialists around that. Instead we get just a very generic, plain, vanilla hospital theme; you just represent patients with dice. Does it deliver on its theme? I suppose. Should it have had a slightly different and better theme, most definitely.
How often does a player make meaningful choices?
Every round is life and death, figuratively speaking. Literally for your dice, I suppose. I had a lot of trouble actually getting an engine going, couldn’t optimize my hospital patient pipeline. I suppose I could chalk this up to my failure to really “get” the mechanics. Perhaps every choice I made was meaningful, and they meant that I was setting myself up for failure, but more of my dice flatlined than I would have liked.
All these quibbles and qualifiers aside, the puzzle here is solid. There were turns where I got all the proverbial gears lined up just right and it felt sooooo good. Of course there were turns where, oops!, I didn’t mean to send that many dice to the morgue, but that came down to my decisions and calculations, not really luck or other players’ meddling.
Does the level of player interaction encourage continual engagement?
You are the architect of your own success or demise, and that includes trying to keep track of what other players are doing. That said, you also cannot really control what they do — you can only react to their choices. This is a simultaneous solitaire style of board game, so each player is going to be as engaged as they want to be, and this will absolutely turn off some players. As it was, I didn’t like it as much as I have some other games.
There is a level of play that can happen here where you pay close attention to your opponents, and inform your choice of ambulance and upgrade each round based on their emerging strategies, but I am certainly not there and I expect most players would not bother. Instead you focus pretty much entirely on running your own hospital, with the action phase even running simultaneously, then when you’re done you proudly or meekly pronounce how many dice you discharged (or neglected to death), and awe, grumble, or laugh at your opponents’ outcomes. That moment of sharing is a strong element in the game, and brings it back around to a multiplayer experience, but it is otherwise lacking in this area.
Is the game balanced such that it feels like a fair experience?
I think perhaps the game is almost distressingly balanced, to the point where a win comes down to luck and timing if everyone is playing optimally all of the time. I wish there were a few more interactive mechanics, I guess, beyond just picking an ambulance and an upgrade. More levers to pull as a player. Everybody is, instead, on an extremely level playing field. Fair? Sure.Balanced? Yeah. Fun? Eh.
Yes, not a lot to say here. Your opponents’ choice in ambulance and upgrade can interfere somewhat with your strategy in theory, but in practice I just did not really find this to ever be the case. If Josh took what I wanted, the remainder, or even a blood bag, were always serviceable alternatives for my tableau.
How often would you want to play this game?
Let me level with you: I’d probably only play this if someone asked for it by name. I personally would never bring it out. Monthly game night only has time for so much game in the world, and there are only twelve months in the year. Game night is short. Life is long.
If I had a weekly game night, this might hit the table now and again, and only with the right group of players.
I enjoy a crunchy puzzle like this, but the low level of engagement is such that I’d probably only break it out occasionally. It serves better as a warm-up board game, or maybe a smaller, chiller board game night where you just want to puzzle along-side some friends. Josh is right, though: Game night is short; life is long. It gets 1 point and can thank me for even that.
Is the game accessible?
It’s clear and concise, and requires a low level of reading but a high level of critical thinking and color coordination. BGG pegs this game at 10+ box / 10+ community, and I’d have to agree. All that said, this one is easy to pick up.
I found this game both easy to learn and easy to turn around and teach. The rulebook is short and clear enough; I don’t think we really ever had to look anything up, and we certainly did not have to go hunting for any clarifications.
Is the game good value?
As of this writing, I found a copy of this game for $40 at a specialty retailer website ($41 on Amazon), and that’s still a bit steep for me. If I got a deal on it used for $15-20, I’d consider picking it up, even with my reservations. I think it’s fun enough for the right audience — Thom’s appreciation of the puzzle aspect, for example.
I wouldn’t object to having a copy of this in my collection, but given the $55 price tag, and both the qualified audience and re-playability, I’m not in any rush to get my hands on a copy–certainly not at full retail price.
Je ne sais quoi?
When everything goes well, this game feels very, very good. But this game also suffers from that “lose-more” feeling: once you start losing, it can be hard to recover into a winning strategy. A lot of this depends on how you feel about the rest of the game and whether or not its puzzley-ness is good enough for you.
Not to beat a dead die (which sounds extra redundant), but this game would have really stood out if it had embraced the whackier potential theme lurking within. The actual puzzle, though, is really solid, and gives that really satisfying sensation of things falling right into place common in good engine builders.
Final Thoughts
This game feels almost, but not quite, great, and in that shortfall it drops all the way down to OK. There are some solid concepts here and its engine building is reasonably well executed, but it feels a bit bland and it missed some big opportunities. There can be a fine line between a ‘Puzzle’ and a ‘Game,’ and somewhere along the line it tripped and stumbled across that line into puzzle territory.
Final Scores