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Hippocrates Deep Dive
What the Community Thinks About Hippocrates
Hippocrates presents a fascinating case study in design ambition versus execution. Channels like Chairman of the Board and Getting Games consistently praise its core puzzle mechanic while wrestling with the systems that lead players to it. The game's reputation among experienced hobbyists is genuinely mixed, reflecting a design with real brilliance that some feel is obscured by friction and administrative overhead.
Core Mechanics That Define Hippocrates
The Doctor-Patient Networking Puzzle
At its heart, Hippocrates features a spatial puzzle where players connect doctors to patients using medicines and treatments. The networking mechanism allows doctors to treat patients independently or in combination, with different doctors specializing in different medicine types. When doctors share responsibility for a patient's care, their treatments stack and connect like puzzle pieces. This core mechanic generates engaging strategic depth: players must find the right doctor, acquire the appropriate remedies, and arrange them to cure patients efficiently while managing limited resources. Designed by Alain Orban and published by Game Brewer, this networking layer is the part reviewers single out as the highlight.
The Market-Based Doctor Recruitment System
Players hire doctors through a market system where a doctor's cost depends on its position in the available pool and the coins stacked on it. Patient availability each round is influenced by drafting and assistant powers, and players welcome patients into their infirmaries through that drafting. Meanwhile, players manage their doctor workforce across contract tiers, earning points for completed contracts and managing the flow of patients through treatment. Patients who are not treated advance toward an emergency state and eventually leave the game, creating pressure to keep the pipeline moving.
The Hippocrates Experience
The Heavy Euro with Ancient Roots
Hippocrates immerses players in ancient Greece during the time of the historical physician Hippocrates, who reframed illness as a natural phenomenon rather than divine punishment. The setting adds thematic weight: players run competing infirmaries, hiring physicians and healing patients in a richly historical simulation. The game captures the logistics of medical management across several rounds of increasingly complex decision-making, with reputation determining how much players must pay their doctors and creating a constant tension between growth and cash flow.
The Administrative Burden
The path to the puzzle is long. Players must navigate patient drafting, manage money and reputation across multiple tracks, handle dummy players in lower counts, move patients between states, and track doctor contracts and wages. Each round cycles through several phases: welcoming patients, paying wages, recruiting physicians and buying medicine, treating patients, and scoring. This extensive housekeeping, while thematic, often overshadows the core puzzle that makes the game special, and it is the most common complaint reviewers raise.
What Makes Hippocrates Stand Out
The Designer's Pedigree
Hippocrates comes from Alain Orban, a designer known for ambitious heavy euros, and is published by Game Brewer, a publisher recognized for visually polished games with strong mechanical ambition. The choice to set the game in ancient Greece, grounded in real medical history, distinguishes it from generic hospital themes and gives the production a distinctive identity on the shelf.
The Networking Mechanic Innovation
Few games explore the spatial puzzle of stacking and connecting specialist workers to targets as thoroughly as Hippocrates does. The ability to create chains where one doctor leads to another to reach a patient, or to combine doctor specialties to address complex patient needs, offers satisfying puzzle moments. This mechanism rewards careful planning and creative problem-solving in ways that most worker placement games do not, and it is what keeps the game's defenders coming back despite its overhead.
Potential Drawbacks
The Long Drafting Process
Multiple reviewers identify the patient and doctor acquisition systems as tedious. The steps required to set up the round, option doctors, and reveal contracts take time and feel disconnected from the actual puzzle-solving. This front-loaded complexity can fatigue players before they reach the engaging part, and Chairman of the Board specifically called the drafting fiddly and drawn out.
The Admin-Heavy Design
Managing the clinic zones, tracking multiple doctor contracts, paying wages based on reputation, moving patient tokens through states, and handling dummy players at lower counts transforms Hippocrates into a housekeeping exercise that can overwhelm the core experience. When played with fewer than the full complement of players, the dummy proxies add cognitive overhead without adding decision-making satisfaction, which reviewers found detracted from the parts they genuinely enjoyed.
If You Enjoy Hippocrates
Players who love Hippocrates typically gravitate toward heavy euros with spatial puzzles. Kanban: Driver's Edition offers comparable logistical depth and interlocking systems for those who relish optimization. Food Chain Magnate rewards the same careful resource sequencing and planning. Those drawn to the medical theme might explore Dice Hospital, a lighter dice-manipulation game about patient treatment that strips away the euro overhead to focus on the core puzzle of assembling cures. The networking and tableau aspects also find kindred spirits in Everdell, which blends worker placement with satisfying construction.
What Reviewers Are Saying
"I loved that part of the game, and for me that should have been the core focus of it. The problem was that to get to that fun part there was a lot of hoops to jump through, like the drafting process to get the patients and the doctors was long and drawn out. It was fiddly and tedious."
— Chairman of the Board
"The rest of the game really did detract from that main part, because it very much felt like a game of admin and housekeeping, especially because if you weren't playing this at the full player count of four players then you replace the real players with dummy players."
— Chairman of the Board
"It's an auction and bidding game, tile placement, it's heavy, and some people say it's pretty good, so we gotta do it."
— Our Family Plays Games