A branching, choose-your-path tabletop built for a card payments processor on the Gulf Coast. The storm is days away and the forecast keeps moving. Six shared injects establish the threat, then the room's own decision — fail over early, or hold and harden — sends the exercise down one of two independent, fully-scripted paths. The weather doesn't care which one you pick.
Every detail below is fictional — specific enough to feel real in the room, and generic enough to map onto almost any organization whose people, facilities, and critical services sit in the same path.
A card payments processor headquartered in Tampa, Florida, processing debit and credit transactions for 14,000 merchants and 60 community banks and credit unions across the Southeast. ~2,200 employees, 1,100 of them on the Tampa campus, which also houses the primary data center. A secondary data center in Charlotte is designed to take over if Tampa goes down.
Seabrook's clients don't think about it until it stops working. When a debit card is declined at a grocery store before a storm, nobody blames the bank — they blame the moment. Seabrook's job is to make sure the moment never comes, even when its own building is in the cone.
Six injects, delivered over the first 46 hours, that every player experiences regardless of what the room ultimately decides. This phase ends with the decision that splits the exercise in two.
Forecasters upgrade Tropical Storm Delphine to a hurricane. The projected track now includes Tampa Bay, with landfall roughly 96 hours out and rapid strengthening possible. The crisis management plan says to activate at a hurricane watch. There's no watch yet.
HR runs the numbers: 40% of Tampa staff live in mandatory-evacuation zones. The ride-out roster lists 60 names; 22 of them live in Zone A, and several have already said they'll be evacuating their families.
IT reports that the last full failover to Charlotte was 14 months ago and ran at 60% of normal capacity. Two systems added since — including the new settlement engine — have never been tested there.
Coastline Federal Credit Union and Gulfway Markets both ask for written assurance that card processing will be uninterrupted. Landfall is projected for the 2nd of the month — the day before monthly benefit deposits hit and transaction volume peaks.
The telecom carrier warns that one of Tampa's two fiber routes runs through a flood zone. The generator fuel supplier says it can't guarantee refueling after landfall — hospitals and emergency services come first under its contracts.
Delphine is forecast to make landfall as a Category 4 about 30 miles south of Tampa, but the track uncertainty is still 60 miles either side. A planned failover to Charlotte needs an 18-hour cutover window and moving 140 people. County officials have just ordered Zone A evacuated. The window to fail over in an orderly way closes tonight. The room has to decide.
From here, the facilitator runs one of two fully independent scripts depending on what the room chose in Inject 6. Toggle between them below to see how each one unfolds — in a live session, players only ever see the one they earned.
The cutover to Charlotte begins on schedule. Authorizations move cleanly, but the new settlement engine fails to start in Charlotte. Settlement files for 60 bank clients begin to queue.
Of the 140 staff asked to relocate to Charlotte, 31 decline — they won't leave their families ahead of a Category 4. The relocated team is working out of a hotel ballroom, and nobody has decided how their hours, lodging, or overtime will be paid.
Running at reduced capacity, Charlotte pushes the decline rate at Gulfway Markets to 4% during the pre-storm shopping rush. Photos of "card not working" signs spread on social media, tagged with the grocery chain's name.
Delphine wobbles south overnight and makes landfall 70 miles from Tampa. The campus sees tropical-storm-force winds and some flooding, but no structural damage. By noon, a client's CFO is telling peers that Seabrook "panicked."
Business leaders want to fail back to Tampa immediately to restore full capacity. IT warns that failback has never been rehearsed and carries more risk than the failover did.
Most relocated staff are cleared to return, but 23 employees from the southern counties — including four from the Charlotte team — have homes with significant flood damage. Others still have no power and no way to know when it's coming back.
Several bank clients are asked by their own examiners to report on the service degradation. They need a root-cause summary from Seabrook within 48 hours, written for a regulator to read.
Relocation and cutover cost $6.8M. The insurer's position is that business interruption coverage requires physical damage at the insured site — and there wasn't any. The CFO and COO disagree openly about whether the decision was worth it.
A new system forming in the Gulf has a seven-day track that again includes Tampa. Seabrook is partially failed back. The room must decide whether to complete failback now, stay split across both sites, or move everything back to Charlotte and wait.
The post-incident review finds that the settlement engine was deployed with a single-site architecture. Making it recoverable will take an estimated nine months and a budget no one has approved.
The ride-out team reports to campus. Fourteen of the 60 rostered staff don't come — they're evacuating their families. The remaining 46 are told to expect at least 72 hours on site.
Overnight, Delphine strengthens and the track shifts north — directly toward Tampa Bay. There are no longer 18 hours to complete an orderly failover before tropical-storm-force winds arrive.
Delphine makes landfall as a Category 4. Commercial power fails across the campus and the generators take the load. Storm surge floods the lower level of the parking structure, where fuel deliveries are staged.
Debris cuts the second fiber route, isolating the Tampa data center. An emergency failover to Charlotte begins without a cutover window. Card processing is down for three hours on the morning benefit deposits land.
The ride-out team has been working for 36 hours. One engineer is injured clearing debris from a generator intake. Roads are closed, and relief staff can't reach the campus.
In the storm zone, Coastline cardholders can't use debit cards at the few open stores, gas stations, and pharmacies. Local TV reports residents unable to buy essentials. The credit union's CEO calls Seabrook's CEO directly.
Seabrook still can't reach 180 Tampa employees. The emergency notification system depends on cell networks that are mostly down, and HR is working from home addresses that may no longer be habitable.
Coastline Federal Credit Union's general counsel sends a formal letter asking why Seabrook didn't fail over before landfall, and requests the decision record from Day −2 under the contract's audit clause.
The Tampa facility has water damage and can't safely return to service for at least three weeks. Charlotte is carrying the full load at 60% capacity. The room must decide how to shed load — which clients and transaction types get priority until capacity is restored.
All services are running from Charlotte, but chargebacks, exception handling, and settlement reconciliation for three days of disrupted transactions will take two more weeks. The insurance adjuster can't reach the campus until Day 9.
The two paths are built to converge on the same hard questions, arrived at from opposite directions.
The full Seabrook scenario — every inject, both paths, and the debrief questions — is available as a print-ready PDF you can share with your own team or board. Enter your email and we'll take you straight to the download.
The Seabrook exercise is a sample — built to show how a natural disaster simulation can branch on the decision that actually matters, and stay uncomfortable in both directions. A simulation built for your organization starts with your sites, your people, and your recovery strategy.
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