How to run a remote game day
A game day is a planned practice incident. The team breaks something on purpose, in a safe place, and watches how fast it notices, who does what, and where the runbook falls short.
On a remote team the practice tends to go wrong in the same ways a real incident does: people scatter across a call, a DM, and three channels, and the lessons are gone by Monday. Run the drill the way you want the real thing to run. One channel, one thread for the timeline, one walk-in voice room, and every fix written down where the team will see it.
The usual way
Remote game days often look like this.
- The secret plan. One person knows the scenario and keeps it in a private doc. Nobody else knows when it starts or when it is over.
- The scattered response. Someone starts a call, someone else starts a DM, and the person who spots the alert posts it in a channel nobody is watching.
- The fuzzy timeline. Afterwards, nobody can say when the alert fired, when someone noticed, or when the fix went out.
- The forgotten fixes. The drill finds a stale runbook and a missing alert. Both are still stale and missing a month later.
A format for a distributed team
1. Announce the drill in the channel
A few days before, post one message in the team's incident channel. Same shape every time.
- When: the window the drill can start in.
- Where: the system or environment it runs against.
- Who: who is responding and who is running the scenario.
- Stop word: the phrase that ends the drill if something real breaks.
The responders know a drill is coming. They do not need to know what it is. The stop word matters most: a real incident always wins.
2. Keep one thread for the timeline
When the drill starts, the person running it posts "Game day started" in the channel. Every update from then on is a reply in that thread: what someone saw, what they tried, what changed.
Short, timestamped replies are enough. The thread is the timeline, so nobody has to rebuild it from memory later.
3. Respond in a walk-in voice room
Use the walk-in voice room beside the incident channel instead of starting a new call. Responders walk in when they pick up the drill, and anyone curious can walk in to listen and walk out again.
This is the same room you would use for a real incident war room, so the drill doubles as practice getting there.
4. Call it, then write down the gaps
When the drill is resolved, or the clock runs out, post "Game day over" in the thread. Then, while it is fresh, reply with one line per gap you found:
- An alert that fired late or not at all.
- A runbook step that was wrong or missing.
- Access somebody needed and did not have.
Give each gap an owner and a date in the same reply.
5. Review it like a postmortem
Within a day or two, walk through the thread as a team. Use the same blameless format as a remote postmortem: what happened, what helped, what to change. The difference is that nobody had a bad night.
Make it repeatable
- Pin the announcement format. The next person running a drill copies it from the pin.
- Keep a scenario list. A thread of past and planned scenarios stops the team from drilling the same failure every time.
- Rotate who runs it. Everyone learns the system faster from the side that breaks it.
- Practice the handoff. End one drill with an on-call handoff and see what the next person has to ask.
How Bullpen fits
Bullpen is team chat with walk-in voice rooms and AI helpers on the roster. A game day can live in one thread in one channel, from the announcement to the list of fixes.
The timeline lives in the channel. Every update is a reply in the same thread, so the order of events is one scroll.
The response happens in the channel's walk-in voice room. It stays open beside the channel. Responders walk in when they pick up the drill and leave when it is done.
Wren writes the notes. Wren is an AI helper. In that walk-in voice room, Wren posts notes and action items back to the channel the room belongs to, so what was said out loud lands next to the timeline.
Scout finds the last drill. Scout is an AI helper on the same roster. Mention Scout and ask what the team found the last time it drilled a database failover. Scout answers from what was said and links the message it came from.
Nix keeps the fixes honest. When someone says "I'll update the runbook by Friday", mention Nix in the thread and the reminder arrives in the channel on the day. How to keep track of follow-ups in team chat covers the details.
Try it this week
Post a game day announcement in your incident channel with the four lines above, and pick a window for the drill.