Welcome to Zombiepuram is my flagship mega-game, built to run a whole room at once. Your people split into factions trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic Bangalore. Each faction holds PUBLIC goals its members can see - and every member also carries PRIVATE goals nobody else knows about. It all plays out across a big hex map with resources to control, trade and fight over, while my team runs the zombies and the rules of the world. What you get is dense, real political-intelligence work: reading agendas, managing information asymmetry, and deciding who to trust.

Core Mechanics

The game runs on negotiation, deal-making, alliance-building - and, now and then, alliance-breaking. Factions move across the map, claim and swap resources, and chase both their public mandate and their members' private aims. Nobody holds everything they need, and no faction survives alone. Success comes from influence, not authority - from coalitions, brokering and strategy, not position on an org chart.

Related reading: Negotiation skills for managers · Stakeholder management for managers · The Put The Player First framework

What It Reveals

Under pressure, with incomplete information and competing objectives, people stop performing and start behaving. You'll see who builds coalitions early, who hoards information and who shares it, who earns trust through action, and who leads without any formal hierarchy to lean on.

Who It's For

Built for mid-to-senior leaders working in the real soup of competing priorities, cross-functional dependencies and political complexity. It's especially strong for leadership teams that need sharper negotiation and better alignment across the organisation. It also doubles as a diagnostic - six hours of real behaviour before you design a larger development programme.

What Happens in the Room

The game runs in phases. Early on, factions meet internally, build a strategy, and make first contact with other groups. The opening moves are tentative - everyone's calibrating who to trust and how much to reveal.

By hour two, alliances are forming. Some are announced, some stay quiet. The central tension is information asymmetry: every faction knows something the others need, and the call of when to share it, with whom, and at what price is exactly where the real leadership behaviour lives.

Hour four is where alliances break, and the cost of earlier decisions comes due. The faction that burned bridges to hit its own goal finds collective action almost impossible when the final phase demands it. And the broker who quietly kept everyone talking? Now the most powerful player in the room - even if they're nowhere near the top on points.

The final phase can't be won without a coalition. The groups that built genuine trust get there. The ones who played it transactional scramble. In the debrief, I connect exactly what just happened to the political landscape your people navigate every single week.

Specific Patterns That Surface

• Who makes first contact across factions early - and whether they lead with an offer or a demand
• Who shares information freely to build trust, versus who hoards it as leverage to deploy later
• Who becomes the broker - holding relationships with several factions at once without getting captured by any one of them
• Whose commitments hold under pressure, and who switches sides the moment their faction's position changes
• How covert or overt the politics get - some groups play in the open, others run parallel conversations the rest of the room never sees
• Whether the group can sustain collective action once individual goals are met, or whether coordination collapses the instant self-interest is satisfied

When to Bring This In

• Senior leadership teams where political dynamics are quietly denting decision quality - the game makes visible what usually stays unsaid
• Post-merger environments where two cultures are still operating as separate camps - the faction structure mirrors the reality exactly
• Organisations where "alignment" conversations keep happening and never resolve - this creates a shared, felt experience of what misalignment actually costs
• As a diagnostic before you design a larger programme - six hours of real behaviour beats any survey

When This Isn't the Right Fit

• Groups under 15 - you need enough people for genuine competing interests and real faction dynamics
• Frontline or junior teams - this is built for people already living in political complexity, and it lands best when they recognise the dynamics
• Anything less than a full day - the 6-hour arc is the product, and half-day versions lose the political depth that makes the debrief matter

Where the real learning lands: the debrief

Every session ends on an EPPA debrief - Experience, Patterns, Principles, Application. Nobody leaves with vague reflections. They leave with one named behaviour to change and one specific situation to use it in. And I run the debrief myself, as the person who watched every coalition form and fracture - that continuity is what makes it stick.

Straight answers about Zombiepuram

Why 6 hours? Can it be shortened?
The 6-hour arc is the product. The political dynamics - how alliances form and fracture, how trust gets built and spent, how individual and collective interests collide - need time to develop. Squeeze it into 3 hours and groups are only just grasping their strategic position when it ends.

What if real political tensions get activated?
The debrief is built for exactly that. I separate what the game surfaced (patterns and tendencies) from what the real workplace holds (history, specific people). Making patterns discussable without making them personal takes the designer in the room, not a licensed facilitator reading from a script - and that designer is me.

Is it right for teams already in conflict?
Depends on the goal. If you want shared vocabulary for talking about the dynamics causing friction, Zombiepuram works beautifully - it moves the dynamics into the game world so they're discussable without being accusatory. If you're trying to resolve one specific interpersonal conflict, a game is the wrong tool, and I'll tell you so.

What seniority is it for?
Mid-to-senior. People need to recognise coalition politics, information asymmetry and competing factions as things they already live. It's most valuable when it creates recognition, not novelty.

Bring this to your team

Tell me about your leaders and the political dynamics you're wrestling with, and I'll tell you honestly whether Zombiepuram is the right fit. No hard sell either way.

Message me on WhatsApp Call +91 99458 61640