Hospital

Frame · Institutions and order thematic

Healing under time pressure, decisions over life and death – a place where competence, empathy and system collide.

Design question – Imagine your game is set in a hospital. Who gets healed, who decides the order – and what if the resources are not enough?

Reference example – Theme Hospital: planning a hospital, with waiting rooms, staff and made-up diseases. Trauma Center: surgery against the clock. Pandemic: treatment becomes a worldwide task – four diseases, one team.

Associations

• Typical Activities – Healing, Diagnosing, Managing, Prioritizing
• Typical roles – hierarchy (doctor/nurse/patient), trust, dependence
• Typical spaces – wards, emergency room, operating theatre, waiting room, corridors
• Typical conflicts – emergency, diagnosis, triage, recovery

Atmosphere

tense, sterile, hectic or anxiously quiet

Coherence

Implied Activities: Healing, Diagnosing, Managing, Prioritizing. Mechanisms: Worker Placement (assigning staff), Action Points (limited actions per round), Event (emergencies), Triage (the ordering decision as a mechanism). Ludic Organisational Structures: political order (hierarchy), economic order (resource scarcity).

Compatible with

• Uncanny (AT-14)
• Dread (AT-17)
• Duel (SI-02)
• Epidemic (SI-09)
• Rivalry (SO-02)
• Cult (SO-07)
• Marketplace (SP-13)
• Amid Upheaval (TM-09)
• Cyclical Time (TM-14)

Tension with

• Circus (TH-18) – A field hospital for circus artists. Every act carries an injury risk; the healing art becomes an art of its own. Or: clown therapy in a children’s hospital.