Hot Seat Triage

Hot Seat Triage is an arcade triage game about the cognitive traps of real emergency rooms. The waiting room is full, the information is thin, and every patient has a fading aura: their own clock to decompensation. Pick a patient. Spend questions from a shift budget that is never quite enough. Then make the call: NOW, SOON or LATER. Each of the 498 hand-written cases is built around one named cognitive bias: anchoring, availability, premature closure, presentation and stereotype bias.

The heartburn that is not heartburn. The back pain that "just needs ibuprofen". Fall for it, and the Clinical Notebook shows you what the trap was, what you missed, and what you never asked. Every case is written and clinically reviewed by a practicing emergency physician and medical educator, grounded in the clinical decision-making literature (Croskerry, Graber, Tversky & Kahneman). Every case is also a claim about medicine, and a claim can be wrong: any patient can be flagged from the notebook with its case number attached, and those reports go straight to the person who writes the cases.

Patients you send to SOON or LATER do not disappear. They stay in the room on their own clock, they can deteriorate, and some will need a second look. Radio calls bring ambulances: accept, and their notes turn into extra questions while the clock runs faster. Mutators such as Night Surge and Understaffed change the pace again.…