Critical Care: The Game

About this board game

Critical Care: The Game is a cooperative board game for 1-4 players that brings the teamwork and intensity of an ICU to the table in approximately 120 minutes.

Players take on the roles of ICU doctors, working together to stabilize patients and remove the injury and crisis tokens threatening their lives. No medical knowledge is required: more than 300 cards explain real ICU medicine in plain English, making the game accessible while remaining grounded in real clinical concepts.

Each patient can suffer injuries across five systems: the brain, heart, lung, blood, and inflammation. A separate Crisis track represents suffering and proximity to death. As crisis builds, complications become more likely, creating difficult priorities for the team.

• Choose from 8 unique patients, each with a backstory.
• Manage 25 ICU Diagnoses, including Sepsis, and 50 possible Complications.
• Use more than 100 Therapy cards, from medications to invasive procedures.
• Call on over 25 Specialists, including a Cardiologist and Pharmacist.
• Prepare for unexpected pager events, such as a 2am Emergency Room consult.

Every day, the game engine attempts to add Injury and Crisis tokens while players race to remove them. If a patient’s injury spaces or Crisis track fills, a Code Blue begins. The team must work together to save the patient; if anyone dies from a Code Blue, everyone loses.

The team wins by removing all injury tokens from every patient chart and transferring patients out of the ICU, or by advancing their Goals of Care to hospice. If patients remain without either outcome after Day Seven, the result is a draw. With its combinations of patients, diagnoses, complications, therapies, and specialists, Critical Care: The Game offers substantial replay value.