Puzzle Mechanics for the EOC Stand-up Challenge (In-person Course)

Disaster GamingCon 2026 Pre-Conference Training Course

Instructor - Victoria Kluge

The Puzzle Mechanics for the EOC Stand-up Challenge is an advanced, practitioner-focused training for emergency management professionals responsible for designing, facilitating, and evaluating the EOC Stand-Up Challenge. A 30-minute, two-team escape-room–style exercise that validates and evaluates an organization’s ability to rapidly activate and operate an Emergency Operations Center.

This master class does not teach generic exercise design or tabletop facilitation. Instead, it provides a deep, implementation-level understanding of this specific escape room’s architecture, mechanics, and learning intent, ensuring that exercise directors can replicate the challenge faithfully, adapt it responsibly, and use its outcomes to generate meaningful readiness insights.

Participants will learn why each element of the Stand-Up Challenge exists, including its two-lane structure, functional pods, time pressure, puzzle-based decision gates, resource constraints, and final 60-second Incident Commander brief. Emphasis is placed on preserving decision stress, maintaining psychological safety, and avoiding common facilitation behaviors that unintentionally dilute learning.

Through detailed instruction, participants examine pod-by-pod design intent, puzzle construction and calibration, controller and facilitator roles, performance data collection, and debriefing techniques specific to this escape room. The course also addresses safe adaptation rules, allowing agencies to customize scenario content while protecting the core mechanics that make the exercise effective.

Upon completion, participants will be able to set up, run, and debrief the EOC Stand-Up Challenge without over-facilitation, explain the exercise’s outcomes to leadership, and integrate the challenge into broader training and exercise programs as a diagnostic and onboarding tool.

Intended Audience

• Emergency Management Agency exercise directors

• Training and preparedness officers

• EOC managers and planners

• Consultants and facilitators authorized to deliver the EOC Stand-Up Challenge