The Outbreak Floor — State Public Health Edition

Digital Download

Game Creator: Philippe Borremans / RiskComms FZCO

Estimated Time to Play: 90–120 minutes

Number of Players: 5–8 players plus a facilitator

Roles (7):

Public Information Officer, State Health Commissioner, Epidemiology & Contact Tracing Lead, Immunisation Programme Manager, School & Education Liaison, County Health Officer, Community & Faith Outreach Liaison (optional)

Game Description:

The Outbreak Floor is a tabletop crisis simulation built around a measles outbreak crossing into its third county — and a state health department that meets it already carrying six years of declining public trust it didn't create in this room but has to communicate from anyway. There's no accusation to disprove and no clean slate to protect. The credibility deficit is the starting condition, not a consequence of anything players do in the first round. The objective isn't damage control. It's recovery — clawing measurable ground back from behind, against an audience primed to disbelieve the department before it says a word.

Features:

•      Credibility deficit as a starting condition, not a failure state — the Trust/Legitimacy tracker begins at –2, not 0, and reaching the reframing threshold from there requires five net gains with zero offsetting losses across the whole session.

•      Message-source modeling, not just message content — statements are evaluated on whether they're delivered by a voice the specific affected community already has reason to believe, not just on accuracy; a technically correct statement from the wrong messenger can cost trust.

•      No legal constraint, pure credibility constraint — unlike other editions in this series, nothing here is classified or under investigation; the entire obstacle is that almost nothing said is taken at face value on arrival.

•      Real institutional limits built into the tables — a defunded contact-tracing system, a CDC field team that can only embed in one county at a time, and no multilingual materials for the largest affected non-English-speaking population all surface as resource strain, not flavor text.

•      Facilitator-driven escalation — a 10-round, 40-hour clock moving from naming the deficit honestly, through consistency across three counties, to whether the deficit narrowed at all by the end.

•      Four distinct endgame states — Rebuilt Confidence, Confirmed Distrust, Outbreak Outpaces Response, or Institutional Handoff — with no outcome in which every objective is achieved.

•      Scalable — runs with 5 players doubling up on roles or a full 7-person table; the Public Information Officer role should never be cut.

Game requires 1d6 and 1d10 (not included with digital download; free online dice rollers work).