Bench Press

We’ve posted before on the Federation of American Scientist’s Immune Attack computer game as a great example of the use of games in science education. But, science “edutainment” isn’t limited just to computer games. Fans of Wizard’s Magic the Gathering and Konami’s Yu-Gi-Oh trading card games will immediately recognize The Healing Blade, a trading card game designed in the spirit of Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh but designed around the battle between antibiotics and bacteria (HT: AMEDNEWS)

The game was designed by two self-admitted “mega-geek” physicians, Dr. Arun Mathews and Dr. Francis Kong, who met in medical school and created the company Nerdcore Learning to promote The Healing Blade and other medicine-related “edutainment” paraphernalia. As to why they created the concept, Dr. Mathews notes:

I was struck upon the complexity and yet innate nature of gaming within the choice I would make for putting some of my sick patients on particular antibiotics … Essentially, in a similar way, when you are playing a complex multi-tiered video game, we are making similar choices by obtaining data from our cultures [and] making risk-management decisions.

Truer words were never spoken.

Amazingly, while Mathews and Kong had only intended to bring 30 copies of the game to launch at the American Medical Students Association annual meeting, a printing error turned that into over 100 copies, 90% of which sold! Mathews describes the sight:

We had this gaggle of students just sitting down, spreading out on a bunch of tables, all playing the game. That is one memory that will take a while to fade, because it was such a neat thing to see students getting super excited about infectious disease and therapies.

As an unabashed former-Magic-and-Yu-gi-oh player, I can definitely see the appeal. There is something very compelling about the mix of chance and strategy in trading card gameplay. Sadly, at the time of the writing of this blog post, The Healing Blade’s online purchase form shows that the game is sold out. So, in the meantime, I will have to leave you with some pictures of some very nice-looking game card art:

(Images and video from Healing Blade website)