Takahe’s Solo Den: Hippocrates

1 - 4 Players 90 - 120 Minutes Age: 12+
Designer: Alain Orban
Artist: Laura Bevon
Publisher: Game Brewer

Addressing the elephant in the room

Game Brewer is a publisher known for many outstanding games - Gentes, Gugong, Stroganov… all these lovely Euros are an absolute joy to play and offer a solid thematic integration in a genre well known for its dryness. However, many of Game Brewer’s recent releases have suffered from a sub-standard quality of their production, leading to a noticeable backlash from fans that probably -and unfortunately- discouraged others from trying their games.

With Hippocrates, one of the latest games from this publisher, the situation has certainly improved, however let’s be frank here – the questionable quality of some of the components you’ll find in the box will certainly make you raise your eyebrows. Does that hinder your enjoyment of the game? Perhaps to a small extent… but is it a deal breaker? Not at all!

Another strong thematic display

Hippocrates -as the name suggests- is thematically wrapped around this Greek physician who is considered to be the father of medicine (at least that’s what Wiki is telling me…😊). Having said that, you probably know what the game is going to be about – treating patients in ancient times, without all the flashy and expensive equipment we are used to nowadays. As a person who absolutely loves to read about the ancient Greece (can highly recommend Stephen Fry’s charming retelling of Greek myths in his Mythos, Heroes, Troy books!) and classical age in general, I was obviously super-interested in this game.

As I very much hoped for, the theme in Hippocrates is certainly more than noticeable and can be seen and felt through most of the mechanisms driving the core gameplay. So yet again, another game from Game Brewer that takes an interesting theme and creates a fully functioning Euro around it. Not the other way around, as it’s quite a common practice among the games of this genre…

Healthcare of the ancient times, dissected into a crunchy euro

However, fully functioning game does not necessarily equal to fun game. And this is where the polarising opinions will inevitably arise. The gameplay structure of Hippocrates is not a typical worker placement affair, nor it resembles anything released in recent times. Each round (4 in total) consists of 3 phases. First phase is called the welcome phase and is about drafting patients – players take turns in “admitting” patients to their “clinic” until each player has done so 3 times.

Each patient is different and requires a different set of elixirs to heal their ailment – patients also provide you with money and VP, first being given before the treatment, second after the successful treatment. What I like about patients themselves is their variety in terms of what they need and what they offer. Some need tons of tonics but will also give you tons of VP, some are easy to treat but won’t be your big “wins”, some give you lots of money but not a lot of VP… yeah, the patients in this game come in all colours and all sizes.

What’s also interesting about this phase is how it affects your position on 2 tracks – the welcome track and reputation track. With each drafting turn, you place your marker on a welcome track based on the position of individual you have just admitted. What this means is that if you pick someone further to the right, your marker will also be placed to the right, meaning the following turn you’ll most likely be picking your next patient as the last person.

Reputation track comes into play during the next phase, however it not only affects the turn order for the following phase but also how much your doctors will cost you whenever you’re about to use them - so keeping an eye out on where your reputation sits can save you precious coins as no-one wants to pay healthcare stuff a lot (sarcasm) and if you are famous, doctors will be eager to work for you even just for a handful of peanuts.

Underfunded but surviving…

Speaking of the second phase, this is where you hire new doctors, purchase medicine kits (containing vials of various types needed for curing patients), or if you have enough coins, even buy a bundle of both, which grants you a bonus knowledge tile of various effects. Since each doctor can treat only specific types of illnesses (via his expertise with certain medicinal tonics), and only a certain number of patients, you will have to pick wisely because buying a doctor that is useless for your patients can be a costly mistake. Same goes for medicine kits – you can’t really afford to buy whatever in this game; you have to take into account what patients you have, which ones are still available… and decide what to buy based on that.

Once your doctor/doctors successfully treat all the people they possibly can, they retire from their profession and you gain victory points they were worth. Same for patients – once treated (and you have to fully treat them during the treatment phase – this game does not do partial treatments), they score you victory points. All the leftover patients you didn’t manage to cure get worse and eventually die, scoring you negative points - so admitting too many of them and not being able to treat them all in a reasonable time can pretty much be fatal for your victory aspiration. After the treatment phase is over, you begin another round of admitting patients and yadda yadda yadda…

Solo mode with some painful caveats

Now, winning and loosing in this game is your typical victory point race – however, what differs Hippocrates from the rest of the euros is the competition itself. You always play against 3 opponents, either human or AI ones. Meaning, in solo mode, you are competing with 3 other bots. Now hold on – hold on… 3 bots might sound like a total overkill but… they are actually super easy to operate. In Phase 1, they pick the highest numbered patients, which also determines their position on welcome track and prestige track. In Phase 2 (doctors and medicinal kits), the follow the same logic. In Phase 3, they do nothing as they automatically score VPs of whoever they have acquired. You really only need to pay attention to the turn order on both tracks, numbers on patients and doctors… and bots’ victory points. Sounds easy, right?

With ai bots in such numbers, there was obviously going to be compromises made in order to make the management of all bots as easy as possible. And these compromises inevitably led to an unfair advantage of your automated opponents – they simply score too much too quickly and too easily for you to be able to stand a chance against them. Only with a portion of luck you might get a smidgen of a chance (when bots take low scoring patients and doctors, and you get what you precisely need) but even then you have to play very well just to match their VPs. From what I have seen on BGG forums, bots almost always score above 60VPs, mostly 65+ and that’s a score that is very hard to achieve. In my 13+ games, they worst scoring bot still managed to get 60+ points with the highest scoring one getting up to 70.

Customised solo mode that is a ton of fun

My solution? To use 60 VP as a threshold for winning and only use bots for what they normally do, minus tracking their VP. And you know what? The game is a total blast now! Gone is the unfair frustration of facing cheating bots – instead, I can fully concentrate on trying to maximise my scoring without being “forced” to take the high value patients so that bots don’t get them. Plus, the slightly fiddly management of which bot took which patient/doctor and whether I increased their VP markers correctly makes this even smoother experience. Using my house rule, I have so-far played 5 games this way and only managed to get 60 VP twice so there is definitely a room for improvement in the way I play.

Again… I have to reiterate: I am having a ton of fun with this one. Especially the patient treatment phase, when you have to solve a mini-puzzle of slotting patients into treatment slots each doctor comes with… it’s just such an enjoyable and rewarding experience, particularly when you end up with patient treated by two doctors, both of which are ready to retire afterwards. Just wow. Really cool mechanic, really neat execution, and I am hoping to see it used as a key mechanic sometime in the future. The rest of the game is solid too, pretty standard Euro-gaming affair, however the theme, the lovely art, the crunchiness of decisions you have to make… a well-rounded package overall.  

Fun and meaty game in a wonky package

It's a shame then that the questionable production quality and some weird decisions in terms of components and the design more-or-less hinder the overall experience. The cardboard tiles are very flimsy and thin. The game board is HUGE and didn’t have to be. The game board does not have any round track and there is no natural end to the game so you have to keep in mind which round you’re playing – or use the other side of the board dedicated to the expansion that has 4 squares for whatever that you can use for round tracking. An unnecessary fiddliness of flipping doctors/medicinal kits way too many times (why can’t they just be stacked face-up?). Missing components (such as players assistants). Laughable “dice”… etc. all of these issues could have been mitigated in many ways. It just seems the game needed a couple more additional play tests and a little bit more time in development, plus a better publisher who would have picked up on these problems.

Despite all that, Hippocrates is certainly a game worth checking out. Interesting theme delivered through a crunchy gameplay with a lovely puzzle twist in the end is definitely an enjoyable package, you just have to bite the bullet with how the game looks and feels in terms of its component’s quality. But you know what they say – don’t judge book by its cover and in this case, Hippocrates definitely deserves more love, especially from anyone who can look past the mixed reception this game received. I am glad I followed my gut feeling by liking the “game part” of this game – and have been thoroughly enjoying treating patients in ancient Greece every time this game hits the table.