The Chalkboard Reliability Playground: Prototyping Safer Incidents With Hand‑Drawn Games

When people talk about cyber incidents and reliability, they usually jump straight to tooling: dashboards, chaos platforms, runbooks, automation. Those matter. But there’s a powerful, underused tool that costs almost nothing and fits on a whiteboard or piece of paper: hand‑drawn, game‑like tabletop exercises.

Think of them as a chalkboard reliability playground—a space where you rehearse incidents with markers instead of machines, narrative instead of alerts, and stick figures instead of service meshes. You’re not breaking production; you’re prototyping safer incidents long before they hit real systems.

This post explores how low‑tech simulations can improve your Cyber Incident Response (CIR) plan, strengthen SRE and DevOps practices, and build organizational muscle memory for the moments when everything really is on fire.

Why Simulate Incidents on a Chalkboard?

We know we should prepare for outages and breaches, but real incidents are expensive ways to learn. Chalkboard exercises give you:

Safety – No risk to production systems or customer data.
Clarity – Abstract reliability concepts become concrete, visible, and discussable.
Practice – Teams rehearse communication, decision‑making, and workflows under (simulated) pressure.
Feedback – Each round generates insights that directly improve your CIR plan and reliability practices.

Instead of waiting for the next 3 a.m. page to reveal gaps, you discover those gaps with a marker in your hand, when the stakes are low and the time is scheduled.

What Is a Chalkboard Incident Exercise?

A chalkboard or tabletop exercise is a guided, conversational simulation of an incident, played out in a room (or virtual whiteboard) using simple drawings and prompts.

Core elements

A simple map – Hand‑drawn boxes and arrows for services, users, data flows, and external dependencies.
A scenario – A short, game‑like story: “Traffic spikes from an unknown source, error rates jump, and customers can’t log in.”
Roles – Participants act as on‑call engineers, incident commander, comms lead, security, product owner, etc.
Turns – The facilitator advances the scenario in steps: new symptoms, log snippets, stakeholder questions, or surprises.
Decisions – The team must choose actions: investigate, mitigate, escalate, communicate.

No complex infrastructure. No production access. Just people, a shared mental model, and a structured story.

Making Reliability Concrete With Hand‑Drawn Games

Reliability concepts—MTTR, blast radius, runbooks, failover—can feel abstract until they’re lived. Hand‑drawn, game‑like scenarios bridge that gap.

Visual storytelling

Drawing the system helps:

Reveal implicit assumptions about architecture and ownership.
Show data paths and dependencies that are often only in people’s heads.
Make failure modes visible: where could things break, and how would we even know?

A facilitator might sketch:

Users → API Gateway → Auth Service → Payments Service → Database
Third‑party provider off to the side
Simple icons for monitoring, logging, and alert channels

When a service “goes red” on the board, people see the impact path immediately. Discussions move from theory to “If auth is down, which alerts fire? Who gets paged? What do we tell customers?”

Game mechanics: challenges and constraints

To keep it engaging and realistic, layer in lightweight game mechanics:

Time pressure – Each turn represents 5–10 minutes of real time. Customer impact grows if problems go unresolved.
Limited information – Only some logs or metrics are available per turn. Participants must decide what to look at next.
Trade‑offs – Choosing to roll back, fail over, or block user actions comes with consequences drawn on the board.

By playing the scenario as a game, teams experience the tension and ambiguity of real incidents, without the chaos of a live outage.

Safely Testing Your Cyber Incident Response (CIR) Plan

Your Cyber Incident Response plan is only as good as your ability to actually execute it. Chalkboard simulations are an ideal way to test and refine CIR workflows without touching real systems.

What to test in a tabletop session

Use the exercise to probe questions such as:

Detection – How does the incident show up? Which alerts fire? Who sees them first?
Triage – How do you decide severity? Is this security, reliability, or both?
Roles – Who becomes incident commander? Who handles internal comms, external comms, and technical investigation?
Escalation – When and how do you bring in security, legal, PR, leadership, or vendors?
Documentation – Which runbooks, playbooks, and diagrams do people actually reference—if any?
Decision authority – Who can authorize riskier mitigations (e.g., blocking a region, shutting off a feature)?

Any hesitation, confusion, or disagreement you see in the room is gold: it points to specific parts of the CIR plan that need clarification, simplification, or training.

Practicing Communication and Decisions Under Pressure

Most postmortems don’t blame missing dashboards—they highlight communication breakdowns and slow decisions.

Chalkboard exercises are perfect for practicing the human side of incidents:

Status updates – Can someone succinctly brief “current status” every 10–15 minutes?
Channel discipline – Do people know which channel is for incident coordination vs. general chat?
Conflict management – How does the team handle conflicting hypotheses or pressure from leadership?
Information requests – Can the incident commander shield engineers from noise while keeping stakeholders informed?

Because the setting is low‑stakes and playful, teams are more willing to experiment with communication patterns, try new roles, and give candid feedback about what feels confusing or stressful.

Lowering the Barrier to Participation

Traditional incident drills can feel intimidating: lots of jargon, heavy formality, and fear of being judged. Hand‑drawn games, by contrast, are lightweight and approachable.

Why the playful format works

Low‑tech – Everyone can participate with a pen and paper, regardless of tooling knowledge.
Psychological safety – It’s clearly a simulation; mistakes become learning opportunities, not performance reviews.
Cross‑functional friendly – Product managers, customer support, security analysts, and leadership can all join.

This is crucial because real incidents are cross‑functional by nature. Having non‑engineers in the game helps:

Clarify how and when to involve customer support or PR.
Expose gaps in how product or leadership interprets technical risk.
Build shared vocabulary around severity, impact, and trade‑offs.

The more perspectives you involve, the more realistic your organizational response becomes.

Feeding Insights Back Into SRE and DevOps Practices

A chalkboard exercise is not just a one‑off workshop. It’s a source of requirements for your reliability and security work.

After each session, capture:

CIR plan changes – Role definitions, escalation paths, severity criteria.
Runbook needs – Steps that people improvised but should be documented.
Monitoring gaps – Questions like “We’d want to see X here—do we even collect it?”
Tooling improvements – Missing dashboards, alert routes, or on‑call rotations.
Training topics – Concepts people struggled with (e.g., blast radius, containment, forensics).

These insights should feed into your SRE and DevOps backlogs as actionable items. Over time, your real systems, dashboards, and playbooks become better aligned with how people actually behave during incidents.

Building Organizational Muscle Memory Through Iteration

One chalkboard session is helpful. Many, over time, are transformational.

Make it a reliable ritual

To build muscle memory:

Run sessions regularly – Monthly or quarterly, aligned with risk areas or upcoming launches.
Rotate scenarios – Cover outages, security breaches, supply‑chain events, and third‑party failures.
Vary the cast – Include different teams, time zones, and seniority levels.
Measure learning, not performance – Track whether questions raised in previous sessions are resolved.

Over multiple runs, you’ll see:

Faster, clearer role adoption when a new scenario starts.
More confident decisions under simulated time pressure.
Better alignment between technical mitigations and business impacts.

That’s what organizational muscle memory looks like: consistent, practiced behaviors that kick in automatically when things go wrong.

How to Run Your First Chalkboard Reliability Game

You don’t need a big program to start. Here’s a minimal playbook:

Pick a simple system
Choose a well‑known service or workflow (e.g., login, checkout, API gateway).
Draw the architecture
On a whiteboard or virtual canvas, sketch the main components and data flows.
Define a scenario
Example: “Unusual traffic triggers alerts. Some users report being logged into the wrong accounts.”
Assign roles
Incident commander, on‑call engineer, security, comms, product owner. Keep it lightweight.
Run the simulation in turns
- Present new clues or events each turn.
- Ask: “What do you do next?”
- Draw actions and consequences on the board.
Debrief thoroughly
- What worked well?
- Where were we confused?
- What would we change in our CIR plan, runbooks, or tooling?

Turn the debrief into tickets and follow‑ups. Schedule the next session right away.

Conclusion: Practice in Chalk, Perform in Production

You can’t prevent every cyber incident or outage. But you can decide whether your first serious practice run happens in front of real customers or on a chalkboard.

Hand‑drawn reliability games let you:

Safely simulate incidents before they hit production.
Turn abstract reliability ideas into tangible, shared understanding.
Test and refine your Cyber Incident Response plan without risking systems or data.
Improve communication, decision‑making, and cross‑functional coordination.
Feed concrete insights back into SRE and DevOps practices.
Build lasting organizational muscle memory for when it truly counts.

Start small: one system, one scenario, one whiteboard. With each game, you’ll make your organization just a bit more ready for the day when the incident is no longer imaginary—and your practiced responses make all the difference.