Bad Medicine - Base game

In Bad Medicine, you and your opponents are given a Malady to treat with pharmaceutical drugs. You'll play cards to name your drug, and to help describe how your drug treats the Malady. But your drug will be given a side effect. Can you spin it so it's not as bad as it sounds?

I originally released Bad Medicine in 2015, when I self-published games through Formal Ferret Games. I'm happy to re-release it here on The Game Crafter.

About this edition

This is the base game for Bad Medicine. It contains everything you need to start playing. It comes with 76 Drug Cards, plus the 20 support cards (Corporate Logos, Start Player, Malady, etc) that the game requires.

One of the goals of this edition is to keep the base game around $25, so there are three big changes from the original version.

• This version comes with 76 Drug Cards.
• The cards are now mini-sized.
• The box the game comes in is blank white, plus stickers you will use to put the box art on the box.

76 cards is enough to play 3 rounds without reshuffling. If you keep playing, you'll likely see many of the same cards again, but they're generally used for different things each time, so you should get several games out of this before you will want to pick up at least one of the 4 packs of extra cards.

The mini cards are perfectly readable, and the box is big enough to hold all the future expansion sets I plan to release.

I've revised some of the card text in the game. I found that some of the side effects that referred to real-life side effects, like "rampant hair growth" or "explosive diahrrea," didn't get the laughs I wanted, and are a bit more punch-down than they should be. So I've made all the side effects even more extreme, and now we have "hair grows its own hair" and "literally explosive diahrrea." Much sillier, much dumber, much better.

I'm excited about making this game available again! It's a deeply weird game, but once you get the hang of its complexities, it really shines. I've had people tell me they've had some AMAZING times playing it. It can be very, very funny. So, I'm happy to see it live on here.

Gil's notes

Bad Medicine was the first game I self-published as Formal Ferret Games. I had The Networks mostly ready to go, but I wanted to start with a "smaller" card game.

Bad Medicine's secret is that it's really a storytelling game dressed up as a party game. The fun of the game is creating the fiction of these awful drugs, and creating things that you can make callbacks to in future rounds.

The 3-4 player is good, but the 5-8 player game is where it's at. Make sure you try it at least once at that player count. It will get loud.

(Also, get vaccinated. For real.)