Designer:  Alban Viard (Card City XL, Small City, Tramways)

Artist:  Ian O’Toole (Age of Steam, Black Angel, CO2: Second Chance, Escape Plan, The Gallerist, Lisboa, Nemo’s War Second Edition, On Mars, Pipeline, Stockpile, Vinhos Deluxe Edition)

Publisher:  AVStudioGames (Card City XL, Small City, Tramways)

Genre/Mechanisms:  city building, economic, pick-up and deliver, simulation, territory building, tile placement

Funding Status:  At the time of this posting, Clinic Deluxe Edition: The COVID 19 is already fully-funded. In fact, pledges currently total more than 182x the initial funding goal with 4 days left to go on the campaign!

Player Count:  1-4

Solo Mode:  yes

Complexity:  heavy

Risk:  medium-low

What It’s About:  Clinic Deluxe Edition is back with limited copies of the base game and a new Covid-19-inspired co-op expansion, with 10 Euros for every expansion pledged donated to the Institut Pasteur and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

How It Works:  Games take place over 6 rounds, featuring 3 phases each: Actions, Business, and Administration. In the Actions Phase, players simultaneously choose sets of actions three times per round. These include Building, Hiring, and Admitting Patients. Players have 2 tokens for each action, so in a given round they can perform each action once, or one action once and one action twice (but not one action 3 times). In the Business Phase, players evaluate Patient Care and Income, Expenses, and Popularity. Finally, the Administration Phase is a bookkeeping phase where players make some adjustments to their player boards, the main board is restocked with certain items, turn orders resets, and the round marker advances. Final scoring involves gaining points for various types of employees, treatment rooms, and buildings, while losing points for various types of patients still under the player’s care as well as time spent over the course of the game.

The new CoVid Pandemic expansion transforms the game from a competitive experience to a cooperative one.

Comparisons:  The easiest comparison, because of the Ian O’Toole art and design work, are his collaborations with Vital Lacerda: CO2: Second Chance, Escape Plan, The Gallerist, Lisboa, On Mars, and Vinhos Deluxe. Chunky Euros, all. With the new Covid-19 Pandemic expansion, the best comparison of the group is probably CO2: Second Chance, because that game includes a full cooperative version as well as a semi-cooperative ruleset.

What Should I Pledge?:
$18 The Vaccine: just the new Deluxe Edition of the CoVid Pandemic cooperative expansion.
$62 The Extension: just the two Deluxe expansions, The Extension expansion and the new CoVid Pandemic expansion.
$162 The Hospital: everything in The Extension pledge level, plus a copy of the base game, Clinic Deluxe Edition (there are limited copies available of this pledge, and at the time of this posting, 54 of 500 copies remain).

Add-Ons:
None.

KS Exclusives
It’s unclear if Clinic: Deluxe Edition: The CoVid Pandemic expansion is headed to retail or not at this point. But it’s possible the entire expansion may end up being a Kickstarter Exclusive. It’s also likely that none of the Deluxe Editions of Clinic will end up at retail, and that all 3 will remain Kickstarter Exclusives.

All-In Total: In the continental U.S. you’re looking at $162 for The Hospital pledge plus $16 in shipping for a total of $178.

Clinic Deluxe Edition: The COVID 19 completes its Kickstarter on Sunday, May 31st and tentatively ships in September 2020.