Your leadership workshops are forgettable. Not because your facilitators are weak — because the environment makes authentic behaviour impossible.
Serious Games for Leadership Development
Put The Player First designs and runs serious games — purpose-built leadership simulations that reveal how your people actually think, decide, and lead under pressure. Not how they say they do. Not how they perform in a safe classroom. How they actually do it when stakes are real and the system pushes back.
Every game is designed and facilitated by Arvindh Sundar. Every session ends with a structured debrief that turns observable behaviour into named development priorities.
Why serious games work when workshops don’t
Traditional training teaches frameworks. Leaders absorb them, agree with them, and then revert to old patterns the moment resources get scarce or stakes get real.
Serious games create consequence-based decision environments. Leaders can’t perform understanding — they have to act. Alliances form and break. Resources move. Quick wins damage long-term trust. Every choice creates system-wide effects.
When behaviour becomes visible in real time, it becomes discussable. And what’s discussable becomes developable.
The games
Six games, each designed to surface a different dimension of leadership behaviour. All facilitated in-person by Arvindh. All built around the same principle: behaviour under pressure is the only data worth developing from.
Welcome to Zombiepuram
Multi-faction crisis simulation in post-apocalyptic Bangalore. Players negotiate, trade secrets, and build coalitions across competing agendas. Surfaces influence, power dynamics, and negotiation under uncertainty.
Bloom
A gardening game that proves the Parijata Principle: generosity outperforms hoarding. Players who protect resources too aggressively fall behind those who invest in others. Surfaces stakeholder management and networking.
Sticky Fingers
A card-based museum heist where no single player holds the full picture. Collaboration isn’t optional — it’s structurally required. Surfaces creative problem-solving and multi-perspective thinking.
Planetfall
Land a spaceship on an unmapped alien planet. Deploy probes, gather data, adapt. There’s no right answer — only disciplined experimentation. Surfaces learning agility and ambiguity tolerance.
Ripple Effect
Each table manages a company. No table can hit its targets alone. Players must trade, cooperate, and negotiate across competing objectives. Surfaces cross-functional collaboration and systems thinking.
Chaos on the Tour Bus
Run a tour bus company through unpredictable events. The game rewards preparation over reaction. Surfaces strategic thinking, scenario planning, and negotiation.
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Designed and facilitated by Arvindh Sundar
Every game at Put The Player First is created by Arvindh — a specialist in systems-driven leadership development and a published game designer. He facilitates every session himself.
The facilitation is where most of the developmental value lives. Running the game generates behavioural data. The debrief — built around the EPPA loop (Experience, Patterns, Principles, Application) — is what turns that data into insight your leaders can actually use.
Work with us
If you’re an L&D head or HR Business Partner looking to run a session, get in touch directly.
If you’re a training vendor or L&D consultant who wants to bring serious games to your clients, see how the partnership works.