Cover the game. Keep the facts.

02 / Short description

The one-paragraph version.

National Triage Service is an early-access strategy game by Civic Simulations, an independent game studio turning complexity into strategy, tension, and play.

National Triage Service is a free, browser-based public-service survival game about running a fictional universal health service.

Players allocate a £204.945 billion reference grant across care, workforce, estate, programmes and long-term transformation, then watch a twenty-year campaign unfold one week at a time. The waiting list is not a slider: it emerges from patient arrivals and constrained capacity. The opening system is calibrated to published NHS England, ONS and DHSC data for England in 2024/25, while assumptions and limitations are published separately. No account is required and saves stay in the browser.

03 / Long description

The full picture.

National Triage Service is not a hospital builder. It puts the player at the top of a fictional national, universal health service and asks them to hold one connected institution together through four five-year terms.

Planned care, mental health, 999 calls, ambulance incidents, A&E and emergency admissions remain separate streams. Queues emerge from arrivals and physical constraints. Money only becomes care when commissioning, staff, diagnostics, theatres, estate and beds line up.

Workforce, construction and transformation arrive on long fuses. Adviser briefings and national harm reporting keep the human consequences visible. Term reports record the service inherited, the choices made and the system left behind.

The reference opening uses published 2024/25 data to establish scale. Model reconciliations, gameplay assumptions and limitations are stated separately. The game is independent of every real health service, government and political party.