Septic Shock

Diagnosis

Through horrible hygiene and severe neglect of your personal health, you've become stricken with an extreme bacterial infection, gravely affecting a select few of your major bodily organs. Without prompt medical attention, you run a serious risk of blood poisoning; your bloodstream will quickly become overrun with malicious, destructive pathogens without proper treatment. Eventually, as the septicemia escalates, your blood pressure will completely bottom out, ending you and your suffering.

The goal of Septic Shock is to overcome this unfortunate condition before it does indeed kill you; purge the infections that plague your bodily organs and course through your vessels, combat them with a variety of procedures and pharmaceuticals, and remedy your quick descent into a lonely, miserable, pitiful death.

How to Play

The game begins with three of eight bodily organs riddled with infection.

Each turn you take is a fresh opportunity to attempt to purge the infection from your body. As well, it serves as a chance for the sepsis to strengthen its hold:

Cough It Up

Spend one or more Tissues, then draw and roll three Phlegm-colored dice. The more Tissues you elected to use, the more chances you receive to re-roll those dice on this turn.

Survey the Damage

Once rolling has completed, resolve the results by placing those dice onto Basic or Special Procedure spaces, or adding colored Pathogen tokens to your Circulation Wheel spaces where your organs are currently infected.

Seek Medical Attention

Any Basic or Special Procedure rows that have been completely filled with dice reward you with abilities; clear the dice from filled Basic Procedure rows to administer local antibiotic injections, gain Pill Tokens, or reset your Tissue supply. Special Procedure rows do not clear, but give you special cards as rewards to use when you see fit.

Administer Care

If you have any Special Procedure cards on hand, or any Pill Tokens in your Pill Bottle, you may use them at this time to help combat your condition.

Circulation

At the end of each turn, your bloodstream circulates its contents. Every token on the Circulation Wheel moves around the spaces; every Pill Token moves one space, and every Pathogen Token moves three.

If a space on the Circulation Wheel should ever contain two colored Pathogens of the same color (after Circulation), that space becomes infected! (This is denoted with a White Pathogen Token over the organ icon)

How to Lose

As the Pathogen Tokens spread throughout the Circulation Wheel, spaces --organs rather, will succumb to infection, lowering your blood pressure. Lose five total organs to infection, you start suffering Hypotension. Lose seven, and without the aid of a Vasopressor pill, you have just died of Septic Shock!

If you're not careful, there are other ways to die... a Heart Attack from sky-high blood pressure, Pneumonia as a result of running out of dice to roll (inability to Cough It Up), or become completely overrun with infection by losing all eight organs!

How to Win

Simply use your cunning and resources to eradicate the infection from your circulation and your organs before it completely takes you out:

Either administer local antibiotic injections to infected organs, or have an Antibiotic pill land on an infected space without any colored Pathogens on it (at the full strength dosage of three pills, mind you).

Clear all organs of infection (the White Pathogen Tokens) to win!

Septic Shock plays in 30 to 60 minutes, sometimes even less than that.

The game mat rolls up nicely and all other pieces fit inside the bag. This was done in an effort to keep quality at its highest, and portability at its simplest.

I really hope you enjoy playing this unique one player game as much as I do!

Clay