In a mysterious world of swords and sorcery, you are the chief (or the nurse) of a temple hospital. Around the world, heroes entered dangerous dungeons in search of fame and fortune. Your job is to nurse and make better all of these heroes from injuries, sickness, and curses of underworld. But watch out! Rival hospitals are waiting for the chance to get in your way. Will you manage to earn the world's respect as a master doctor? Or will you end up as an infamous "dynamite nurse"?

In Dynamite Nurse, a card game with deck-building mechanisms, players represent hospitals that are trying to cure wounded heroes. Each hospital has only so many beds, however, and having too many patients will result in players not being able to take care of them. Thus, players try to dump annoying patients onto each other in order to stay famous as a good hospital chief – and not as the "dynamite nurse"...

Dynamite Nurse is based on two card games from the 1980s — Dynamite Nurse and Dynamite Nurse 2: Bloody Temple — from the same designer, which explains why the original Japanese title of this design was ダイナマイトナース・リターンズ (Dynamite Nurse Returns).