The Cardboard Incident Railway Arcade: Playing Low‑Tech Games With Your Weirdest Outages

Modern outages are complex, noisy, and stressful. Our tools are high‑tech, but our practice often isn’t: a shared doc, a Zoom call, maybe a slide deck if we’re lucky. What if you could rehearse incidents the way pilots use flight simulators—but with nothing more than cardboard, markers, and a whiteboard?

Enter the Cardboard Incident Railway Arcade: a low‑tech approach to incident response tabletop exercises that borrows from game design, engineering toys, and classic game postmortems. You’ll build paper‑and‑cardboard “levels” that simulate your systems, then “play through” weird outages like they’re arcade games.

It’s playful—but it’s not a joke. These low‑tech games can seriously level up how your team responds to real emergencies.

Why Low‑Tech Games For Incidents Actually Work

1. You Already Run Incidents Like Games

Think about a real outage:

There’s a goal: restore service, reduce impact
There are constraints: time pressure, missing info, limited people
There are rules: incident command roles, escalation paths, SLAs
There’s feedback: metrics, logs, customer reports

That’s a game.

Tabletop exercises simply make that game safe, repeatable, and observable. When you remove the pressure of a real customer‑impacting failure, you can:

Experiment with approaches
Make mistakes without consequences
Pause and rewind to inspect key decisions

Low‑tech props—cardboard trains, paper dashboards, sticky‑note alerts—make the abstractions of your system tangible, collaborative, and fun.

2. Low‑Tech = High Focus

When you run drills purely in production‑like tools, people get lost in the details. With a cardboard model or paper system map, you:

Strip away noise and surface key dependencies
Make it easier to see flows instead of screens
Encourage talking and thinking, not just clicking

Engineering education has used paper‑based STEM activities for decades to simulate bridges, circuits, and railways. You can model distributed systems the same way: with lines for data flows, index cards for services, and tokens for users or events.

A Simple Template For Repeatable Incident “Games”

A reusable template makes it easy to design, run, and improve your outage scenarios over time. Here’s a minimal structure you can adapt.

1. Scenario Setup

Define the basics:

Name: "The Ghost Train in Production" or "The Vanishing Log Stream"
Context: What normal operation looks like (traffic, key services, dependencies)
Trigger: How the incident begins (alert, customer report, internal detection)
Win condition: What counts as resolved (SLO restored, root cause identified, comms sent)

On the table, lay out your system “railway”:

Services as cards or boxes
Data flows as drawn tracks or string
External dependencies as stations at the edges

2. Roles & Players

Treat participants like players in a co‑op game:

Incident Commander: orchestrates, keeps timeline, assigns tasks
Tech Leads / Responders: investigate, propose hypotheses, run tests (described verbally)
Comms Lead: handles status updates to customers and stakeholders
Observer / Scribe: tracks decisions, times, and key moments

You can add challenge roles:

Chaos Engine: the facilitator who introduces new events or constraints
Stakeholder NPC: executive or customer stand‑in asking questions at bad times

3. Turn‑Based Progression

Run the exercise in short “ticks” or turns (e.g., 5 minutes each):

State Update: Facilitator reveals what’s happening now (alerts, customer impact, metrics)
Player Actions: Each role states what they do (investigate X, notify Y, rollback Z)
System Reaction: Facilitator updates the board: maybe moving tokens, flipping service cards from "healthy" to "degraded", or adding new alert cards
Time Pressure: Track imaginary time on a timeline; note impact over time

This structure makes it easy to pause, rewind, or branch into “what if we had done this instead?”

4. Ending the Scenario

End when:

The win condition is met
The system is technically restored but team confidence is low
Time is up, in which case that’s a result too

Then move immediately into a post‑game breakdown.

Borrow From Game Postmortems, Not Just Incident Reports

Game studios have a tradition of postmortems where developers dissect a finished game:

What systems worked well?
What failed or never shipped?
What surprised players?
What would we do differently next time?

You can do the same with incidents.

Post‑Game Breakdown Template

After each exercise (or real outage), run a short, structured debrief:

Timeline Review
Walk through major moments: initial detection, first hypothesis, key turn‑around moments, resolution.
What Worked
- Effective early moves
- Good handoffs or communication moments
- Any tool or process that made things easier
What Failed or Felt Bad
- Confusing ownership
- Tool friction
- Unclear goals or priorities
Player Experience Check‑In
- When did you feel stressed, stuck, or overloaded?
- When did you feel confident and coordinated?
- Were any roles under‑ or over‑loaded?
Why It Happened (Systemic, not blame)
- What conditions made this likely? (alerting gaps, architecture, staffing)
- What incentives or habits showed up? (hero behavior, silos)
Design Changes
- What to change in systems (alerts, runbooks, architecture)
- What to change in process (roles, comms templates, escalation paths)
- What to change in future scenarios (difficulty, realism, new constraints)

Treat this as a design critique of your incident response game, not a tribunal.

Applying Core Game Design Concepts To Outage Drills

You don’t need to be a game designer, but borrowing a few core ideas makes exercises more engaging and realistic.

1. Player Experience (PX): How It Feels To Respond

In game design, player experience is about how it feels to play: tension, flow, frustration, satisfaction.

In incident drills, PX is about:

Stress levels at key moments
Clarity of goals and options
How safe it feels to speak up, be wrong, or escalate

Design scenarios that surface real stresses and decision points, such as:

Conflicting priorities: performance vs. data integrity
Incomplete information: noisy alerts, missing logs
Communication dilemmas: what to tell customers when you’re not sure

Then tune difficulty like a game:

Too easy → people disengage
Too hard → people shut down
Just challenging enough → people enter a “learning flow”

2. Balancing: Difficulty vs. Capability

Balancing a game means adjusting rules so it’s fair but not trivial. For incidents:

Start with simple, localized failures (one service misbehaving)
Gradually introduce cross‑team dependencies and multi‑layer failures
Occasionally design a no‑win scenario to explore communication under failure, not just technical fixes

Track how teams perform over multiple sessions and scale complexity as they improve.

3. Level Design: Building Better Scenarios

Think of each exercise as a level:

Intro levels: teach roles and process
Mid levels: mimic known, historical outages
Advanced levels: speculative or rare failures, including multi‑region or supply‑chain issues

Use real incidents as templates:

Abstract the core failure pattern (e.g., cascading retries, stale config, misrouted traffic)
Re‑skin it into a new scenario so people can’t just replay the runbook

4. Design Patterns For Incidents

Games rely on reusable patterns (puzzles, enemy behaviors, level archetypes). Your infrastructure has patterns too:

Thundering herds
Dependency failures
Data corruption vs. data loss
Slow degradation vs. sudden cut‑off

Create a card deck of common incident patterns and combine them to create new “levels” quickly. A few pattern cards plus your cardboard railway map = a new scenario in minutes.

Building Your Cardboard Incident Railway Arcade

You don’t need fancy props. You can start with:

Cardboard or paper for services and components
Markers and tape for drawing tracks, boundaries, and flows
Sticky notes for alerts, incidents, and event updates
Tokens (coins, buttons, or paper circles) to represent users, requests, or messages

Step‑By‑Step Setup

Map your system as a railway:
- Each service = a station
- Each data flow or dependency = a track
- External services = ports or junctions at the edge
Place traffic tokens to show normal operation:
- Requests moving from one station to another
- Background jobs circulating like freight trains
Introduce failure:
- Flip a station card to "down" or "degraded"
- Block a track (dependency) with a red marker or card
- Add new tokens representing error messages or support tickets
Let the team respond:
- They decide where to look and what to change
- You update the board to reflect system reactions

This physical model makes complex interactions visible, even to non‑engineers.

Why Cardboard Beats Slides

Shared space: Everyone can stand around the table, point, and move things
No laptops: Reduced distraction, more conversation
Embodied learning: Moving pieces helps people remember flows and dependencies
Accessible: New hires, stakeholders, and non‑technical participants can follow along

And it’s cheap. A pizza box and some index cards are enough to build your first level.

Making It A Real Arcade, Not A One‑Off

The power comes from repetition and iteration.

Schedule regular sessions: Monthly or quarterly, 60–90 minutes each
Keep a scenario library: Each exercise becomes a reusable "cabinet" in your arcade
Track metrics over time: Time to detection, time to first hypothesis, clarity of roles
Rotate designers: Let different team members design scenarios; this surfaces blind spots

Soon you’ll have:

A shared vocabulary for incident patterns
A smoother, more confident real‑world response
A culture where learning from failure is normal and safe

Conclusion: Serious Skills, Silly Materials

You don’t need a dedicated chaos engineering platform or a perfect staging environment to practice incidents. With cardboard, paper, and a bit of game design thinking, you can:

Make outages visible and tangible
Treat response as a skill you train, not just a thing you survive
Design scenarios that focus on human experience, not just system diagrams

Build your own Cardboard Incident Railway Arcade:

Start small with one scenario and a crude map
Use a simple, repeatable template
Run a real post‑game breakdown after each session
Evolve your designs like a game studio shipping better levels over time

The next time a weird, real‑world outage hits, your team won’t just be reacting. They’ll be playing a well‑practiced game they know how to win—even if the arcade it started in was made out of cardboard.