I never did follow up on my February post about Ashes of Winter Night, a crisis response game that a team of experienced classroom gamers and I designed and executed at ISA 2025.
Short take: It went great!
I figured you might want more details than that, though. Plus, a copy of the draft rules at the end of the article! 🙂
It all began at ISA 2024, over a coffee meeting with Dr. Sarah Dorr, ISA’s Director of Professional Development. I’d just taught a pre-conference game design workshop, and based on participant feedback, Sarah proposed running a game at ISA 2025. I need little wing twisting to run a game, so I readily accepted.
Fast forward a year and several meetings, during which we settled on an objective. When designing games, I always start with the objective and work backwards. A good objective reads like a testable hypothesis, and every element of my designs must contribute to meeting the objective.
In ISA’s case, my objective was to execute a one-hour experiential crisis response game limited to 25 participants.
One hour is a tight fit (I typically recommend a minimum of four hours), so I had to distill it down to core essentials, with simple rules and a fast onboarding process. We also decided on a scenario that was unifying (a natural disaster) rather than divisive (war), so I modified the Palisades fire. Tying a “fictional” scenario to an actual event lends emotional and consequential weight, as players can relate their in-game experiences to real-world challenges.
We further limited the game to 25 participants based on expected room limitations. Even with “only” 25 participants, though, a one-hour time limit required agile refereeing. Since I knew I couldn’t be everywhere at once in a fast-moving crisis game, I assembled a crack team of experienced classroom gamers: Drs. Charity Butcher, Mark Harvey, Petra Hendrickson, and ALPS’s own Jennifer Ostojski. In addition to serving as referees, they also helped with game development.
During a team meeting, we decided to divide participants into five-person teams, with each team representing an abstract crisis response function. Although I technically controlled the game as the Ops Center referee (more on teams below), Charity, Mark, Petra, and Jennifer had free rein to adjudicate team requests, questions, and decisions.
While the game could have been played through narrative alone, I included dice mechanics to physically represent risk and chance. I applied dice pool and resolve mechanics inspired by the roleplaying game Prowlers & Paragons, since the mechanics are easy to teach (disclosure: I write for Mobius Worlds Publishing, publisher of P&P). A dice pool increases the probability of success as more dice are committed to a roll, while resolve—represented by poker chips—provided teams narrative opportunity to reroll, share, or replenish dice (more on narrative below). If you’ve played Dungeons & Dragons or Savage Worlds, resolve is respectively similar to Inspiration and Bennies.
However, I also added a depleting resource mechanic. That is, teams started with a set number of dice that were removed from play when used. This encouraged debate on how and when to spend resources that dice represented–there were means to replenish dice, but replenishment was not guaranteed.
But storytelling was the core mechanic. It wasn’t enough to simply roll dice or slap down poker chips: players had to describe what they were trying to achieve. Players don’t remember dice—they remember stories. They remember working together to overcome obstacles. They remember what it was like to fail, try again, and succeed, and they remember these through narratives.
To that end, the game generated fantastic discussion, even in abstract form. One participant found me the next day and said he couldn’t stop thinking about the game; later, he ran a modified version in his class. This is the “magic circle” effect at its finest, when players recall the game later and continue sharing stories.
The game was a success. Feedback suggests the design and time limit were just right for a conference, yet easy to modify for a longer-form game. For example, one player suggested using colored dice to represent specific types of resources (e.g., green for money, blue for potable water, red for medical supplies, etc.) rather than a generic pool.
Want to see for yourself? Here are the rules and map as used at ISA (ver .51). I’d like to clean these up for formal publication, though, and am open to comments and suggestions. Game on!