CRISISTECH
Go-live is Monday. The vendor just emailed "quick question."
ESCALATES
FRONTOFFICE-SAFE
Win Crisis cards. Keep them through the Audit.
This is the Party Game
Quick, competitive and funny, for game nights and team socials. For organizations and workshops there's a separate, co-operative Professional Edition: ten stages, evidence cards and a structured debrief. Professional Edition rules ↗ · Compare the two ↗
Win Crisis cards. Keep them through the Audit.
Five kinds of card, no pencils, no score sheet.
What's in the box
Card anatomy
The front of a Crisis card is what the Sponsor reads. The back, By the Book, says which kinds of response a professional would reach for and which kinds are traps, with the practice behind it. Nobody looks at the back until the Sponsor has picked.
Go-live is Monday. The vendor just emailed "quick question."
Find out what the vendor found before the calendar decides for you.
A spreadsheet nobody asked for.
DATAEvery card shows its kind as a symbol and a word, so colour is never the only cue. The footer on each Response card names the practice it comes from in the Project: Countdown! Best Practice Database.
Slow down, test it, read it twice. Usually right, sometimes too slow.
Talk to the person who knows. Most missing information is in someone, not in a system.
Check the numbers, the baseline and the logs before you believe anyone.
Act now. Usually a trap, but not when the fire alarm goes off.
Delay, deflect, rebrand. Almost always a trap. A few crises reward saying "not now."
Setup
Use 12 Clock cards: 8:00 AM through 3:00 PM, with DEADLINE on the bottom. Stack them face down and turn the top one face up.
Shuffle the Crisis, Response and Fallout decks. Put the Receipts and the Best Paper Trail card where everyone can reach them.
Deal 7 Response cards to each player.
Whoever most recently sat through a meeting that could have been an email. Hand them the Crisis deck.
A round
The Sponsor draws a Crisis card and reads the front out loud, without looking at the back.
Everyone except the Sponsor plays one Response card face down. If the crisis says PLAY 2, play two; they're read together as one answer.
The Sponsor shuffles the responses, reads each one after the crisis, and picks a winner for any reason: funny, clever, painfully accurate. The winner takes the Crisis card.
Turn the Crisis card over and check every response that was played:
Turn over the next Clock card, or two if the crisis said ESCALATES. Resolve any note printed on a Clock card when it appears.
Everyone draws back to 7. The Crisis deck passes left to the next Sponsor.
The winning answer is the one the company goes with. A funny bad idea still wins you the round and the card, but it's the one that shipped, so it's the one that gets audited hardest.
The clock
One Clock card burns each round, two when a crisis escalates. When DEADLINE turns up, play one last round, then go to the Audit.
The Audit
For each Receipt, discard one of your Fallout cards without looking. You choose which. Keep unspent Receipts in front of you.
Turn over your remaining Fallout one at a time, out loud. If you owe more Crisis cards than you have, return what you have.
The one player with the most unspent Receipts takes the Best Paper Trail card. It counts as a Crisis card. If two or more tie for most, nobody gets it.
Most Crisis cards is Promoted. A tie goes to more unspent Receipts; still tied, you share the promotion. Everyone else is Reassigned to a Special Project.
Teams
Split into pairs; with an odd number, one team of three. Each team shares one hand of 9 cards, plays one response together, and keeps one pile of Crisis, Receipt and Fallout cards. Sponsors rotate by team, and the team picks one voice to read. Everything else is the same.
Variants
Use 8 Clock cards: 8:00 through 12:00, then DEADLINE.
Use all 15 Clock cards.
Play with the Crisis cards from one or two industries. Each has 15.
Before the Sponsor picks, each player gets fifteen seconds to defend their answer.
Office-safe
Cards marked AFTER HOURS are edgier; remove them for work events. Every card in the box, After Hours included, passes this test:
Protected characteristics, health or disability, pay, or anyone's body, age or family.
No role, profession or level is the joke. The intern, the nurse and the CFO are never the punchline.
Meetings, tools, processes, deadlines and jargon are fair game.
No real companies, products, people or disasters.
After the Audit
Optional, two minutes, and the part a team remembers. Spread out the Crisis cards that were won, By the Book side up. Then go round the table:
Sample cards
Tested in simulation
Before any table playtest, these rules were run through a simulator with three kinds of player: comedians who play the funniest card, by-the-book players who play it safe, and balanced players who weigh both. The simulator's humour scores and reading odds are assumptions, so these are design checks, not predictions.
| Measure | Rules v0.1 | Rules v0.2 | Target |
|---|---|---|---|
| Win rate, comedians | 28.8% | 17.1% | Near the fair share, 18.8% |
| Win rate, balanced | 13.2% | 18.6% | |
| Win rate, by the book | 11.1% | 21.5% | |
| Games where the Audit changed the winner | 12% | 42% | A real twist, not a coin flip |
| Crisis cards lost per game in the Audit | 0.9 | 2.5 | Enough to feel |
| Times the Receipt pile ran out | 11,040 | 7 | Almost never |
| Rounds per game | 10.7 | 10.7 | About 30–40 minutes |
What changed from v0.1: roles, objectives and Interrupts moved to add-ons; the Sponsor no longer takes Receipts or Fallout; a winning trap costs two Fallout; the Fallout deck got harsher (12, 16 and 8 instead of 18, 12 and 6); Receipts went from 36 to 60; the Best Paper Trail card was added. Still to test at real tables: teach time (target under three minutes), when players first ask "how do I win?", and whether counting Receipts feels like fun or bookkeeping.
After your first Audit
These are held out of the first edition to keep the teach short. Add one at a time once the table knows the core game.
The six seats from the video game plus the Vendor and the Consultant, each with one power used once per game. The CIO peeks at By the Book; HR swaps a Fallout for a Receipt.
One secret goal each, worth 2 Crisis cards if it came true. "Clean audit: finish with no Fallout."
Played out of turn, one per round for the whole table. "Per my last email" cancels a response; "Let's take this offline" swaps the crisis.
Questions
Win Crisis cards. Keep them through the Audit. Funny answers win rounds; sound answers protect what you won.
Yes. The Sponsor judges on anything they like. The card judges whether it was sound.
No. You know how many you have, not what they say.
Shuffle the discard pile into a new deck.
It's a party game first. The best practices are real, and the Debrief card is there when a team wants to talk about them. The Project: Countdown! video game and workshops go deeper.
Mock the system, the meeting and the jargon. Never the people, the patients or the customers.