Welcome back to Cooperative Surprise Month! This month has seen a surprisingly good cooperative game set in 700 BC called Sammu-Ramat, a “lost” review of Chainsomnia, and a light-and-fun cooperative game called Hissy Fit with the surprisingly weird theme of taking cats to the vet! This week, we take a look at another game with a surprisingly weird theme: NYC: Emergency Room!

NYC: Emergency Room is billed as “A Cooperative Medical Mystery Game” for 1-4 players, Ages 14+. That lower bound of age may seem low or high, depending on who you are, as there are discussions you would want “mature” adults discussing (birth control, the human reproductive system, death, pain, diarrhea). So, be aware that this medical mystery game requires an adult attitude!

NYC was a game I picked up at Target a few weeks ago (early February): I was on the fence about it. On one hand, I love murder mystery games (see our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games) and escape room games. On the other hand, I generally don’t like medically themed games (too depresssing). Should I pick it up?

Then I remembered how the TV show House was originally billed as a a medical mysteries show. If you don’t know the TV show House, it is basically Sherlock Holmes as a doctor solving strange mysteries, but in the medical field (Get it? “House” & “Holmes” … “Wilson” & “Watson”). The show, while pretty dark, is quite interesting!

In the end, that’s why I picked up the game: “a fun medical mystery like House”. Or at least, that was my hope!

Unboxing

NYC: Emergency Room is a pretty standard sized box. See the Coke Can and #2 pencil for perspective.

The game is really just a bunch of envelopes!  All the components are in one of six envelopes.  

Four of the envelopes are cases for four different patients.  Each one of these is a different case.

There is one envelope that has components every game needs: that’s the Code/Research/Rules envelope. See above.

The first patient, though, is not one of the four envelopes… there’s a tutorial that walks you through your first case: Nurse Judy recognizes you are just starting out, and tries to help you through the process!

It’s kinda cool is that every envelope tells you exactly what’s inside (see above)! I can totally see passing this game onto other people after I am done, so it’s good to make sure each case has everything you need to do it!

Considering this is a game from Target, the quality is actually pretty good for everything (see above for some contents of the first envelope).   It’s surprisingly good how good these components are!

Rulebook

There is a rulebook, but you don’t even start with it.  You start with Nurse Judy’s tutorial pamphlet.  It walks you through your first game, and honestly, it does a fantastic job.

By the time I got through the Tutorial, I don’t think I ever looked at the rulebook!  (It comes in the black Codes envelope).  Seriously, I can’t complain or laud the rulebook because I never needed it.   The pure joy of the Tutorial made the rulebook almost unnecessary.  I may have looked it at once later for a rules clarification, but I’m not sure how much you’ll use it.  Listen to Nurse Judy, and you’ll be fine!

The Tutorial

The tutorial takes you quickly through a simple case with Luana Kapule: see above.

This was very easy to set-up and a very quick game.  I think I got through the Tutorial in about 20 minutes.

Seriously, this is one the best tutorials I have seen in a while.  You see all the things you should do, the things you shouldn’t do, and the game walks you through the playthrough very precisely.  

You know that a Tutorial is good when you don’t think you need the rulebook anymore:  20 minutes in, and I think I know the game.  I call that a successful tutorial!

Gameplay

The game is all about what tests and consultations and medications to administer to a patient over a night (a timeline).  You are measured by, frankly, if the patient survives the night.  You have a sheet that you keep track of everything you do and what time you do it: see above.

As you run tests on your patient, you will get codes to look up in the code book: they tell you what happens: frequently, this means you draw a card from a deck of “how the patient is doing”.  Note: the results of the tests do change as time marches forward!  Gulp! Make sure you run that test at the right time!!

What tests do you run?  Holy cow, all the things you can do or know is presented in about 5 pamphlets brimming with medical information!  See above.  This particular mechanic kind of reminds of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. 

Not directly, but the sheer volume of medical information in the game reminds me of the sheer volume of materials in Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective: the maps, the phonebook, the newspapers.  This is a good thing: it really feels like medical mystery! You just have to look in the right place to solve the mystery!

If you can keep the patient alive by running the right tests (remember, tests can be invasive in many ways) and finding the right thing to do (which may be medication or something else), you win!

It goes without saying, but if your patient dies, you lose!

Solo Game: Patient 1

Strictly speaking, my first solo patient was from the Tutorial: but Nurse Judy basically kept me out of trouble, so I don’t know if that counts.

Before I began, I made a copy of the timeline sheet (see above) and left room for notes on the left.  I strongly recommend you do this as well!  First, by making a copy, you can reuse the first case later.  More importantly, I think, is that having the extra space to make notes was a big deal.

You never forget your first patient: mine was Shyla Patel.   

I had to make sure I interviewed her to make sure I knew what was going on.

I was able to do the proper tests and figure out what was going wrong with her.  Along the way, there were places where I could have done “something bad”, but in the end, I kept Shyla alive.

She left the Emergency Room alive and in good health. It was a good day.

Shyla never saw me looking, but my head was buried in these medical pamphlets the entire time.  This is a game about research, it’s a game about following up, it’s a game about what it’s like being a doctor.  (I always wonder if doctor’s do the same thing when we aren’t looking … “What the heck was that?  I gotta look in my pamphlets!”)

It was incredibly engaging, but there was a lot of research, a lot of taking notes (see above) and a lot of reading.  I love that stuff, but some people don’t.  

Why watch an episode of the TV show House when you can just play it? I really enjoyed this game solo.

Cooperative Game

It’s Charlie’s fault I started watching the TV show “House”, so I felt it was apropos that he and Allison play this with me!

Rather than try to explain the game to them, I simply had Charlie and Allison go through the Tutorial.  This was interesting: I am so used to explaining games to people, but I realized this game is just complicated enough that it makes sense to use the Tutorial again!  Rather than teach the game, just play the Tutorial! It really is that good!

After they finished the Tutorial, we encountered Patient 2: Adrian Alexopolous.

The cooperative game was very much like the solo game, but now we have a group of “other doctors” we could bounce ideas off of!  I like this shared responsibility: it’s a little scary to take full responsibility for a patient yourself, and this shared burden made it a little easier to endure.

The burden of taking notes, reading cards, consulting pamphlets also made the game move a little more quickly than the solo game.

Although I liked the solo game, and didn’t have any problem taking the full responsibility of a patient myself, I can see many people bouncing off this!  By having a team of doctors helping each other to help the patient, I can see many people preferring the cooperative mode over the solo mode.  

What I Liked

The Tutorial is fantastic.  It just gets you into the game right way: it’s the best way to teach new players, even if you already know the game!

I like all the medical information available.  I wish the medical pamphlets were bigger books written in a bigger font. I did a lot of reading and research with these!  It felt like the world was large, something to explore, even though I was only reading medical texts.

The mysteries are interesting and engaging.  And the components are great too, especially for a Target game.

What I Didn’t Like

I already said this in the What I Liked Section, but I wish the medical pamphlets were bigger with bigger fonts.  In fact, a lot of these pamphlets had two or three different things in them! I wish they had been broken up a little better … I am sure this is a “it costs money to make big pamphlets” issue, but they would have made it a little easier to use.

In the end, I made copies of the charts/timeline, but it bugged me a little that there weren’t multiple copies of these little sheets: there was only one for each patient!  For multiple reasons (extra space for notes, enabling this patient to be re-used), I strongly advise you to make a copy like I did above!

Conclusion

I really enjoyed NYC Emergency Room and so did my friends.  As long as you don’t have trouble with the theme, mature situations, and potentially life-or-death situations, this is a great mystery game! 

In fact, you could argue that the theme is very engaging because you are making “real” life-and-death situations for a person you meet in the Emergency Room!  Those tense situations may be too much for some people, but if you can handle it, I think it is fantastically riveting!

Allison gives this a 8/10, Charlie says it’s a “Solid Game” (I couldn’t get a number out of him).  I think I am right with Allison: this a 7.5/10 or 8/10 for me.  My hesitancy comes only the theme being potentially being very divisive: “I don’t want to be a doctor right now, that sounds too stressful!“.  I get it, sometimes it might not be as appealing to be a doctor in a stressful situation! Having said that, in the cooperative game, that burden is shared making the game a little more palatable. 

Why watch an episode of House when you can play it?  Just remember when doing patient interviews: “Everybody Lies.”