The best part about reviewing games: free games, especially when it’s a game you are looking forward to.

The worst part about reviewing games: the obligation. I don’t take lightly that publishers trust us to provide our thoughts on a game, so I always put a game through its paces within 60 days of receipt of a game. Normally, that’s not an issue: play a game 3-5 times, write up a piece, move on to the next.

The best AND worst thing about reviewing games: when a publisher sends you the base game, 5 competitive expansions, a co-op expansion, and a campaign book for a single game.

Yeah.

Clinic: Deluxe Edition has a whopping FIFTY-ONE individual expansions. There is a shocking amount of content available for the truly invested player. I loved the base game, but we have to be honest: it’s tough to get anyone to play a game 3-5 times, let alone a couple dozen times to try out all of this expansion content.

So, for now, I’m just going to write about Clinic: Deluxe Edition–The Extension (CDETE). To prepare for this article, I played the base game, its 4 mini expansions, and the 13 expansions in CDETE, once. (This was insane, and we’ll get to that in a moment.)

…

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Following a successful Kickstarter campaign, the game has a new publisher in North America, Capstone Games. And if you’ve been following Capstone for the last 3-4 years, you know that Clinic: Deluxe Edition (or Clinic, for short) is going to lean towards heavier, strategic gameplay.

Clay Ross, the founder of Capstone Games, chatted with me at GAMA Expo this past March about Clinic and I knew Meeple Mountain needed to review it. Clay was kind enough to send the “all in” version of the game. Friends, the all-in version is so massive that I’m only going to review the base game in this article, with a future roundup of expansion content coming later.

(How massive? Try FIFTY individual modules, a campaign book, an expansion based solely on COVID-19, and a solo mode with 10 different end-game goals to beat. This might be the winner for “most content in a single game” this year!)

Capstone has already established itself as the premier medium-to-heavy strategy tabletop publisher based in the US. Ark Nova, Boonlake, Corrosion, Imperial Steam, and a host of other popular titles have cemented this status and Clinic…

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Before we begin, please sanitize your hands. Don your lab coat. Wipe your glasses clean. Take a deep breath. And another. Remember that science class was separate from English class. Therefore, I’ll need you to pardon the prepositional and grammatical stumbles caused by the game’s title. Good? Good.

What do you do in For Science!?

Players place cards next to cards, then blocks on top of other blocks, so some blocks touch other blocks, but other blocks can’t touch those blocks. After stacking the blocks, someone verifies all the proper shapes and colors are properly - and not improperly - touching the other shapes and colors. The reward for stacking blocks is puzzle pieces with pictures. Piece together the puzzle pieces to enclose enough pictures, and you win!

It’s confusing and stressful and chaotic and random, and that’s before you introduce the countdown clock! If you want it even confusinger and stressfuller and chaoticer and randomer, shorten the clock and introduce more events!

I’ve said too much. Also, not enough.

In For Science!, 1-6 lab workers cooperate to concoct the universal vaccine. To do so, players uses their unique abilities as they research designs for cures. Cures are built to match the blueprints constructed from design cards, each showing a series of blocks along one, two, or three strands…

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She Failed Me in Biology

Save Patient Zero is a deduction game where players race to identify three molecules that can be combined to create an effective treatment for a new pathogen. Each player or team receives a player sheet—a five by five grid of molecules surrounded by several areas in which to record information—and a privacy screen, the inside of which explains how to use the tools in your lab.

[caption id="attachment_242209" align="alignnone" width="768"] A player's worth of lab gear.[/caption]

These research laboratories are clearly well-funded, because…

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Have you ever had a great idea for something and then not long after it materializes in some form or another? That great book idea, a catchy song, that t-shirt idea that’s been rattling around your head. It’s part of the collective consciousness, and it’s impossible to escape or genuinely be upset about. It happens. Same goes with game ideas, however instead of someone else taking the idea and bringing it to fruition, the world goes and gets itself a worldwide pandemic.

This is the case with Save Patient Zero. A unique team-based game where two teams race to find an antidote for a new pathogen identified in the titular Patient Zero. Coming to Kickstarter today, the designers of this game were kind enough to provide a prototype copy of the game with a note pointing out that design began for this well before the world was afflicted with COVID-19. It’s a thoughtful gesture, and ultimately the theme does not come across as gratuitous nor insensitive in this day and age.

Science!!

Save Patient Zero is a deceptively simple game which splits players into two teams, along with 1 other player designated as “Savvy”, the Lab Computer (acting as sort of the game…

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With a theme like this, the last thing I was expecting is a game about secret worker placement, bluffing, and deduction. Then again, we are an industry where a german mathematician designed an auction game about worshipping Egyptian gods and named it Ra, so I guess this is par for the course.

Since the Four Humours is based on medicine, that means doctors, and you are a doctor with ambitions. You want to be the most famous throughout the land, and that means traveling to several locations to rub shoulders with nobles, peasants, bards, knights, and witches. There are four goal cards in each game, and your job is to fulfill as many goal cards as you can, but the game will end when someone has achieved two goals. These goal cards are all related to the map, such as…

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Back Four Humours on Kickstarter.

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Nerd Words Science is a word game where the words are about, you guessed it, science. Having a background in both science and words (although after reading this review, you might wonder if the latter is actually true), I was interested in giving it a try.

[rps-include post=6815]

How to Play Nerd Words

Depending on your player count, Nerd Words is played in 2 to 3 teams. During the game, you will either be giving clues for a science term, or working with your team to guess it in under a minute.

Giving clues

When you’re the clue giver you will be choosing a science term from your card and providing clues to get the other players to guess your term. Here’s the catch: the clues that you give have to start with a letter in your science term (but not the first letter). For example, if your term is “melting point”, maybe your first clue is “temperature”.

To give a clue the clue giver fills out their sheet, writing down both the number of words in their term, as well as a clue. Each time a clue is given they bet whether or not any team will correctly guess the term. These points will be lost or gained by the team that the clue giver is on

…

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There’s a fine art to real-time games. Too much going on and you risk overwhelming your players, but if there’s not enough happening they won’t stay engaged. Paramedics: Clear threads this needle by offering clever, streamlined gameplay, simple and easy to understand iconography, and a smartphone app to remove some of the tedium. Let’s dive in and see what I think about the medical real-time game Paramedics: Clear!

Overview

In Paramedics: Clear! 1-4 players will assume the role of EMTs responding to patients with various ailments and maladies. It’s difficult to really sift through a real-time game playthrough so I’m going to go over the basics, and leave out some of the details.

The game is played in multiple rounds consisting of 60, 45, and 30 second shifts, with only a single player going at a time. Using the free smartphone app players will select the current shift, then hit the start button to begin. The app will start counting down the time using an appropriately grim EKG indicator.

A player’s turn (shift) consists of a number of different actions which include treating patients, using medical supply tokens matching the injuries on patient cards, trading or acquiring supply…

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Oveview

The process of cytosis is the method by which a cell intakes material for its survival then expels it. Simply stated, when the cell takes stuff in, it surrounds the object and entraps it in a bubble called a vesicle. The vesicle is responsible for ingesting and disposing of everything contained within it. The game of Cytosis attempts to reconstruct this process in a way that is fun, challenging, and educational.

Cytosis lasts for a number of rounds determined by player count. In the game, the players will be competing to obtain and complete different types of cell component cards that award victory points in various ways. Each player has several workers at their disposal and these workers will be used to select various actions from the game board in order to complete the criteria required to play their cards. When the game is finished, the player who has scored the most “health points” (HP) will be the winner.

Components

The game of Cytosis includes a large, brightly colored game board, several decks of cards, 5 sets of worker meeples in different colors with an additional 2 grey worker meeples, 10 transport disks (2 per color), and 15 player markers (3 per color). The cards are divided into several types: Goal cards,…

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