It can be hard enough getting through a four-person game of Monopoly without somebody forgetting the rules or storming off halfway through. Yet ‘Megagame’ EnTRUSTed, developed by HeRC and the Farr Institute in conjunction with Connected Health Cities, requires at least 40 people to play, tasking them with working together to run a simulated Hospital Trust.
EnTRUSTED is back in November after a highly successful first run earlier in 2018. Fancy finding out how a 40+ person game works, and how to sign up for the next one? Read on.
The game was open to anybody and players included members of the Centre for Health Informatics, NHS staff and seasoned Megagame players. The event was attended by games blogger John Sear, who has written a piece on the game here.
At the beginning of the game, players divided themselves into two teams, which each became a separate Hospital Trust. The Trusts were then further divided into a hospital, which focused on the day-to-day treatment of patients, and a board, which managed higher-level decisions.
These two groups carried out their daily tasks using a mixture of token exchanging and puzzle solving. For example, success in the operating theatre was determined by how quickly surgeons completed logic and spatial puzzles along the lines of the ‘car park puzzle’. Elsewhere in the hospital, nurses balanced seeing enough patients and avoiding ‘tiredness tokens’ which, if the nurse was holding too many, would force them to sit out a turn in the ‘nurse rest area’.
Meanwhile, the board carried out tasks such as reviewing staffing policy, dealing with public relations issues and communicating messages from the ‘Department of Health’ to the hospital staff. These messages would usually be conveyed by the Directorate of the hospital, who worked with both groups.
