| 👨👩👧👦 | Players: 1 – 4 |
| ⏳ | Time: 30 – 60 minutes |
| 🎂 | Ages: 14+ |
| ⚙️ | Mechanisms: Co-operative, deduction |
Have you found yourself watching medical drama shows like House or Grey’s Anatomy, and trying to solve the cases before the characters on the show? Then you’ll love Medical Mysteries: New York Emergency Room from Identity Games.
In this game, you’re working the graveyard shift and must keep your patients alive until morning. You start with a tutorial case, and are then presented with 4 further cases to solve.
Each case contains information on the patient’s symptoms and medical history. There are also several small leaflets of medical information, so you have all the necessary information. You’ll ask questions and run tests, recording your actions on a patient form. As you work through story cards that offer more clues, you’ll eventually find the answers you need to administer treatment, and hopefully keep your patient alive!
Each action brings you closer to morning; if you don’t figure out what is wrong with your patient and treat their symptoms by morning, your patient won’t survive. I enjoyed this action-based time mechanism. Other mystery games I have played have employed real-time elements, and I find this can make puzzle-solving stressful!
This game was such a fun way to exercise my strategic and critical thinking skills. I appreciated being able to take my time absorbing the information so that I could decide the best course of action to take. The medical information leaflets were really helpful, and I never felt like I needed additional information.
By starting with a patient you’re responsible for keeping alive, Medical Mysteries adds a thematic sense of drama and urgency that other mystery games (e.g., murder mysteries) lack. I was also pleasantly surprised that Medical Mysteries doesn’t use confusing medical jargon to get its theme across. Instead, this is done with clever design to make the information look like medical records. This made it easy to stay focused and absorbed while playing – something not easily achieved when so many things are vying for our attention.
You can see this post on Instagram here. For further information about Medical Mysteries: New York Emergency Room, check out the publisher’s website.
The copy of Medical Mysteries: New York Emergency Room used for this review was provided to Board All The Time by VR Distribution.
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