Welcome to Zombiepuram is a multi-faction negotiation and influence simulation where participants — divided into groups — represent factions in a post-apocalyptic city. Each faction possesses unique information, individual goals, and a shared collective objective that requires cross-faction cooperation.

Core Mechanics

The game requires trading, negotiation, alliance-building, and occasionally breaking alliances. No single player has all the necessary resources, and no faction can succeed in isolation. Success depends on influence rather than authority.

What It Reveals

The simulation exposes authentic behaviours under pressure — with incomplete information and competing objectives. It demonstrates who builds early coalitions, hoards or shares information, earns trust through action, and leads informally without formal hierarchy.

Who It's For

Designed for mid-to-senior leaders operating in environments with competing priorities, cross-functional dependencies, and political complexity. Particularly effective for leadership teams needing improved negotiation and alignment across organisations. Also functions as a diagnostic tool before designing development programmes.

What Happens in the Room

The game runs in phases. Early phases: factions meet internally, build strategy, make first contact with other groups. The opening exchanges are tentative — everyone is calibrating who to trust and what to reveal.

By hour two, alliances are forming. Some are announced; others are quiet. The game's central tension is information asymmetry — every faction knows something the others need, and the decision of when to share it, with whom, and at what price is where the real leadership behaviour lives.

Hour four is where alliances break. The cost of earlier decisions becomes visible. The faction that burned bridges while achieving its individual goal finds collective action nearly impossible when the final phase requires it. The broker who kept everyone talking is now the most powerful player in the room — even if they're not winning on points.

The final phase requires coalition. Groups that built genuine trust get there. Groups that played transactionally scramble. The debrief connects what just happened to the political landscape participants navigate every week.

Specific Patterns That Surface

• Who initiates cross-faction contact early — and whether they approach with an offer or a demand
• Who shares information freely as a trust-building move — versus who treats information as leverage to be deployed strategically
• Who emerges as a broker — maintaining relationships with multiple factions simultaneously without being captured by any one
• Whether commitments hold under pressure — which players shift allegiance when their faction's position changes
• How covert versus overt the political behaviour is — some groups play openly, others run parallel conversations the rest of the room doesn't know about
• Whether the group can sustain collective action once individual faction goals are met — or whether coordination collapses the moment self-interest is satisfied

When to Bring This In

• Senior leadership teams where political dynamics are affecting decision quality — the game makes visible what usually stays implicit
• Post-merger environments where two cultures are still operating as separate entities — the faction structure mirrors the organisational reality
• Organisations where "alignment" conversations keep happening without resolution — the game creates a shared experience of what misalignment costs
• As a diagnostic before designing a larger development programme — 6 hours of real behaviour gives better data than any survey

When This Isn't the Right Fit

• Groups smaller than 15 — not enough faction dynamics; the political complexity requires enough people to generate genuine competing interests
• Frontline or junior teams — the game is designed for people operating in politically complex environments; it lands better when participants already recognise the dynamics
• When the timeline is less than a full day — the 6-hour arc is the product. Half-day versions lose the political depth that makes the debrief matter

The Debrief

Every session ends with an EPPA debrief: Experience, Patterns, Principles, Application. Participants don't leave with general reflections — they leave with a named behaviour to change and a specific situation to apply it in. The debrief is facilitated by the same person who ran the game. That continuity is what makes the insight land.

Bring This Game to Your Team

Questions About Welcome to Zombiepuram

Why 6 hours? Can it be shortened?
The 6-hour arc is the product. The political dynamics — how alliances form and fracture, how trust is built and spent, how individual and collective interests come into tension — require time to develop. In a compressed 3-hour version, groups are just starting to understand their strategic position when the game ends.

How do you handle it if real political tensions get activated?
The debrief specifically addresses the difference between what the game surfaced (patterns and tendencies) and what the real workplace situation contains (history, specific relationships). Making patterns discussable without making it personal requires the designer in the room, not a licensed facilitator following a script.

Is this suitable for teams that are already in conflict?
Depends on the goal. If the aim is to build shared vocabulary for discussing friction-causing dynamics, Zombiepuram works well — it externalises dynamics into the game scenario, making them discussable without being accusatory. If the aim is to resolve a specific interpersonal conflict, a game is the wrong intervention.

What level of seniority is this designed for?
Mid-to-senior. Participants need to recognise coalition politics, information asymmetry, and competing factional interests as patterns they already encounter. The game is most valuable when it creates recognition, not novelty.

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