Practice Incidents Before They Happen
A facilitated Game Day runs your engineering team through realistic failure scenarios in real time, measuring detection speed, response process gaps, and team coordination — so the first time they face a real incident, it feels familiar.
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A Game Day is a structured, facilitated incident simulation where your engineering team responds to realistic failure scenarios in real time. Unlike chaos experiments that test system behaviour, Game Days test team behaviour: how quickly your team detects an incident, how they communicate under pressure, which runbooks they reach for, and where their incident response process breaks down.
Incident response muscle memory is built through practice, not through reading runbooks. Engineers who have experienced a cascading failure — even in a controlled environment — respond significantly better to real incidents. Detection times are shorter, communication is cleaner, and escalation decisions are faster because the team has a shared mental model of what a real incident looks and feels like.
Our facilitated Game Days use realistic scenarios drawn from your architecture and incident history. We introduce complications mid-scenario — a monitoring tool that is unreachable, an on-call engineer whose phone is not ringing — to surface the edge cases that table-top exercises miss. Every timing is measured, every process gap is documented, and the debrief produces a prioritised improvement backlog that feeds directly into your incident response programme.
Engagement Phases
Scenario Design & Briefing
We design 2–3 realistic incident scenarios based on your architecture and incident history. Scenarios are kept confidential from participants until execution. We brief engineering leadership on the exercise structure, safety stops, and what we will measure.
Live Exercise Execution
We inject failures while participants monitor, detect, diagnose, and respond as they would in a real incident. We observe and log detection time, communication patterns, runbook usage, escalation decisions, and resolution steps. We introduce realistic complications mid-scenario (a tool is down, a key engineer is unavailable).
Debrief & Report
We run a structured blameless post-mortem with the full team. We present measured metrics (detection time, time to diagnose, time to resolve) and observed process gaps. We produce a written report with prioritised process improvements and a recommended practice schedule.
Deliverables
Before & After
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Incident detection time | Unmeasured | 4 min average |
| Response process gaps | 0 known | 6 identified |
| Team confidence | Qualitative | Scored baseline |
Tools We Use
Frequently Asked Questions
Will this be disruptive to our normal operations?
Game Days are run during a dedicated time window with engineering management approval. We run them in a staging environment that mirrors production, so there is no impact on live users. The exercise requires 4–6 engineers for half a day, which we coordinate around your sprint schedule.
What if the team performs poorly?
That is a valid and common outcome, and it is the entire point. A poor Game Day performance in a safe environment is infinitely better than a poor incident response in production. We run the debrief as a blameless learning exercise — the focus is on process gaps and tooling gaps, not individual performance.
How often should we run Game Days?
Quarterly is the industry standard for teams building the muscle. Monthly Game Days are common for teams with high on-call rotation or rapid infrastructure change. We recommend scheduling a follow-up Game Day 60–90 days after the first to validate that process improvements were implemented and are working.
Know Your Blast Radius
Book a free 30-minute resilience scope call with our chaos engineers. We review your architecture, identify your highest-risk failure modes, and recommend the experiments that will give you the most signal.
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