Barnes on Games- Healthy Heart Hospital in Review

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I do love games that put you in the position to maximize sort of sinister behavior. Greed, Inc comes to mind, I've heard 18XX too, they make you play a robber baron but not just in the way that you build up a company like a good eurogamer, but it gives you incentives to sometimes take in-game "societally" bad actions to maximize your personal position.

I really like this one. Easily my favorite VPG, in that I've played it 5-6 times now and plan to keep it, whereas most of their titles I appreciate at first, but trade away after 2-3 plays.

I like the cube mechanic, but I get what you're saying about the balance. You should be able to get a sense of whether a type of cube is more available to treat or not, and doing certain treatments before others and making use of the bonus cube returns is a must. But it is wonky that the types of illnesses that are in most need of being treated (with cubes in triage) are the harder ones. I like that challenge, though.

Also, you're right that there could have been a little more depth to the style of the game. I'd like to see this get picked up by Z-Man or AEG or someone like that, who could give it a little more in development and production.

Actually, with the glut of Pandemic titles, I can totally picture an adaptation of this called Pandemic: The Hospital, which is a ground-level view of people dealing with the different diseases from Pandemic.

Gary Sax wrote: , I've heard 18XX too, they make you play a robber baron but not just in the way that you build up a company like a good eurogamer, but it gives you incentives to sometimes take in-game "societally" bad actions to maximize your personal position.

Yes. Also in 18XX is very common to simply make everything worse for everyone including you if you can take the hit better than other players. It's really evil hahaha