The Analog Outage Labyrinth Board: Designing a Tabletop Risk Game Your Engineering Team Actually Wants to Play

Incident postmortems and dry runbooks rarely get engineers excited. But give them a whiteboard, a stack of cards, a physical “labyrinth” map of your systems, and a chance to “break production” in a safe environment? Suddenly, people are leaning in.

This is the promise of analog tabletop outage games—low-cost, low-stakes simulations where your team collaboratively works through outage scenarios, explores failure modes, and practices decisions before real customers are impacted.

In this post, we’ll walk through how to design a tabletop risk game—the “Analog Outage Labyrinth Board”—that your engineering team actually wants to play, using principles from educational technology and learning science to make it engaging and effective.

Why Tabletop Outage Games Work

Tabletop exercises are not new. Emergency management, aviation, and healthcare have used them for decades to rehearse disaster response. Translated into an engineering context, tabletop outage games offer several advantages:

Low-cost, low-stakes practice
No dashboards to wire up, no chaos monkey required. Just people, pens, a board, and some scenario prompts.
Plan evaluation before the crisis
You can test incident runbooks, escalation rules, and communication protocols before they’re needed in a real outage.
Gap discovery across teams
These sessions quickly surface where communication breaks down, who’s unclear on roles, and which dependencies are invisible.
A safe environment for decision practice
People can experiment, make mistakes, and see consequences without reputational or customer risk.
Great fit for IT and engineering risks
Outage management, data loss, security incidents, and service degradations map naturally to scenario-based simulations.

When designed thoughtfully, tabletop games become more than a meeting; they’re a structured learning environment grounded in how adults actually acquire skills.

Bring in Learning Science: Why EdTech Principles Matter

If you want your tabletop game to be more than a fun diversion, it helps to borrow from educational technology principles:

Active learning: Participants do the work—analyzing, deciding, explaining—rather than passively listening.
Scaffolding: You start simple and increase complexity as the group gains confidence.
Feedback loops: The game clearly shows the consequences of choices, and the debrief connects those to real-world processes.
Social learning: People learn from each other’s mental models, not just from a “correct” answer.
Situated practice: Scenarios are realistic, derived from your actual systems, tools, and constraints.

The result is a tabletop game that doesn’t just entertain—it builds mental muscle for real incidents.

The Analog Outage Labyrinth Board: Concept Overview

Imagine a physical game board that represents your production environment as a labyrinth of services and dependencies. Each node is a system, service, or team; edges represent critical paths and integration points.

Around this board, engineers, SREs, support staff, and managers sit together and play out outage scenarios using:

Scenario cards: "Database latency spikes," "Auth provider partial outage," "Unexpected feature flag rollback."
Event tokens: Indicators for alerts, customer reports, or new symptoms appearing over time.
Role badges: Incident commander, comms lead, on-call engineer, SME, etc.
Decision tracks: Simple visual tracks for time, severity, customer impact, and internal load.

Your goal: navigate the labyrinth of an unfolding outage, making decisions under constraints, while keeping impact and chaos under control.

A Step-by-Step Framework to Design Your Game

Here’s a structured, repeatable framework to design and run your own Analog Outage Labyrinth Board tabletop exercise.

1. Define Learning Objectives First

Resist the urge to start with clever scenarios or artwork. Ask:

What should participants be better at after this session?
What behaviors or decisions do we want to practice?

Common objectives:

Practice using an incident command structure.
Improve clarity around who communicates what, to whom, and when.
Expose hidden dependencies between systems or teams.
Build comfort escalating early rather than hesitating.
Exercise newly written runbooks or incident tooling.

Write these down. Refer back to them when designing mechanics.

2. Map Your System as a Labyrinth

Next, build your analog map:

List major components: Core services, data stores, external providers, key APIs, user entry points.
Arrange them visually: On a large sheet or whiteboard, lay them out as nodes in a “labyrinth”: clusters, pathways, and chokepoints.
Add dependencies: Draw arrows for critical data or traffic flows. Highlight brittle or high-risk links.
Mark risk hotspots: Identify places where past incidents originated or where impact would be severe.

You don’t need a perfect architecture diagram; you need a playable abstraction of how systems interact.

3. Create Scenario & Event Cards

Now design the challenges that will drive gameplay.

Scenario cards (starting conditions):

"Sudden 500 errors on checkout endpoint from EU region."
"Background jobs failing to process orders; backlog growing rapidly."
"Increased login failures reported on social media, no alerts firing yet."

Event cards (time-based developments):

"PagerDuty alert: DB write latency above threshold."
"Customer success escalates a VIP complaint."
"Traffic spikes 3x due to promo campaign."
"Cloud provider status page reports partial outage."

Use real incident histories as inspiration, but slightly anonymize or remix them to avoid blame or re-litigating old arguments.

4. Define Roles and Rules

To keep the session focused and realistic:

Assign roles:

Incident Commander: Coordinates decisions, assigns actions, keeps time.
Technical Lead(s): Own investigation in specific domains (e.g., backend, infra, data).
Comms Lead: Handles updates to stakeholders, customers, and internal channels.
Observer/Scribe: Tracks decisions, questions, and notable moments for debrief.

Set basic rules:

Each “round” represents 5–10 minutes of real time.
After each round, draw an event card to simulate new information.
Decisions must be verbalized: what you do, who does it, and what you expect to learn.
The facilitator updates the board (impact, severity, systems affected) based on choices.

Keep mechanics simple enough that cognitive load goes into thinking about the incident, not trying to remember complex game rules.

5. Model Consequences Visually

One powerful aspect of a physical board is that you can show the ripple effects of decisions:

Place tokens on affected systems to show spread of impact.
Use a timeline track to mark when key actions occurred.
Use colored markers to indicate customer impact vs. internal operational strain.

For example, if the team decides to roll back a deployment, you might:

Reduce severity temporarily (good!)
But add an event where a dependent service now breaks because it expected the new contract (new problem!)

This cause-and-effect loop is where much of the learning happens.

6. Facilitate Like a Learning Experience, Not a Test

As facilitator, your job is guide, not judge.

Clarify the scenario and rules upfront.
Keep time, pace the introduction of event cards.
Ask probing questions:
- "Who needs to know about this right now?"
- "What assumptions are we making?"
- "What signal would confirm or disprove that hypothesis?"
Resist telling them the "right" answer during play. Capture issues for the debrief.

The aim is not to see if the team can perfectly “win” the game; it’s to surface how they think and collaborate under pressure.

7. Debrief: Where the Real Value Lives

Never skip the debrief. This is where insights turn into improvements.

Use questions like:

Where did communication feel smooth, and where did it break down?
What roles or responsibilities felt unclear?
Which parts of our systems surprised you?
Did we rely on tools or data we don’t actually have in reality?
What process, documentation, or tooling changes would help in a real incident?

Capture concrete follow-ups:

Update or create runbooks.
Clarify ownership and escalation paths.
Adjust alerting thresholds or dashboards.
Plan training for new incident roles.

Treat these sessions as continuous improvement loops, not one-off workshops.

Tips to Keep Engineers Engaged

A tabletop outage game will fall flat if it feels like busywork. A few ways to keep it compelling:

Make it real: Base scenarios on your actual stack, tools, and incident history.
Keep the stakes clear: Use customer and business impact tracks so decisions feel meaningful.
Start small: First sessions can be 45–60 minutes with a single, contained scenario.
Rotate roles: Give people a chance to practice being Incident Commander or Comms Lead.
Celebrate learning, not perfection: Normalize “we discovered a gap” as a win.
Iterate the game design: Ask for feedback on the format and tweak future sessions.

When done well, engineers begin to see these games as valuable reps—practice that makes them more confident and effective on real on-call shifts.

Conclusion: Build a Culture That Practices on Purpose

Outages and incidents are inevitable. Chaos, confusion, and misalignment don’t have to be.

By turning incident preparedness into an analog tabletop labyrinth game, you give your teams a structured, low-risk way to:

Explore how your systems actually behave under stress.
Practice decisions and communication before the stakes are high.
Reveal and fix gaps in processes, ownership, and tooling.

Borrowing from educational technology—active learning, feedback, scaffolding—you can design tabletop exercises that are not just engaging, but deeply effective.

Start simple: draw a rough map, pick a past incident, and walk through it with your team. Then iterate toward your own version of the Analog Outage Labyrinth Board. Over time, you won’t just improve your incident response—you’ll build a culture that practices on purpose, long before the next real outage hits.