Bangalore has fallen. A zombie outbreak has fractured the city into rival factions — each holding different secrets, different resources, and different agendas. There’s also a collective goal that no one can reach alone.
That’s the setup. What happens next reveals more about your leaders than any 360 review ever will.
What the game is
Welcome to Zombiepuram is a multi-faction negotiation and influence simulation. Participants are divided into groups, each representing a faction in a post-apocalyptic city. Every faction has unique information, individual goals, and a shared collective objective that requires cross-faction cooperation to achieve.
The only way to succeed is to trade, negotiate, build alliances — and sometimes break them.
No single player has everything they need. No faction can win in isolation. Influence, not authority, determines outcomes.
What it reveals
This game surfaces what people actually do when stakes are real, information is incomplete, and other people’s goals compete with their own.
You see who builds coalitions early and who waits too long. Who trades information freely and who hoards it for leverage. Who earns trust through action and who loses it through short-term thinking. Who leads informally when no formal hierarchy exists.
The debrief connects those patterns directly to real workplace dynamics: navigating politics, influencing across teams, and negotiating without positional power.
Who it’s for
Zombiepuram works best for mid-to-senior leaders who operate in environments with competing priorities, cross-functional dependencies, and political complexity. It’s particularly effective for leadership teams that need to improve how they negotiate and align across the organisation — not just within their own function.
It also works powerfully as a diagnostic. If you want to understand how a leadership cohort actually operates under pressure before designing a development programme, run this game first.
Logistics
- Group size: 15 to 60 participants
- Duration: 3 to 4 hours including debrief
- Format: In-person
- Facilitated by: Arvindh Sundar