This is my flagship, and it is the biggest thing I make. A whole room, all at once, split into factions trying to survive in a Bangalore that has gone very badly wrong.

Every faction has PUBLIC goals its members can see. Every single member also carries a PRIVATE goal nobody else knows about. There is a big hex map with resources worth controlling, trading and occasionally fighting over. My team runs the zombies and the world.

And that is it, mechanically. What comes out of it is six hours of dense political work - reading what somebody actually wants versus what they said they wanted, deciding what to reveal, deciding who has earned trust. Which is your Tuesday, with better lighting.

Core Mechanics

Negotiation. Deal-making. Alliance-building. And, around hour four, some fairly memorable alliance-breaking.

Factions move, claim and swap resources, and chase a public mandate while quietly servicing private aims. Nobody has everything they need. Nobody survives alone. Not one person in that room can win by being senior, because in Zombiepuram nobody is.

Influence, coalitions, brokering. That is the whole toolkit. Not a long list, really. It is just that none of it behaves the way you expect once other people want things too.

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

What It Reveals

Leadership workshops have a measurement problem, mine very much included. Most of them measure how well people can describe good behaviour. Give a room six hours, incomplete information and competing objectives, and they stop describing anything at all. They just behave.

So you find out who builds coalitions in the first hour. Who hoards information and who spends it. Who earns trust by actually doing a thing they said they'd do. And who can lead when there is no title left to lean on.

Who It's For

Mid-to-senior leaders. People already living in the soup - competing priorities, cross-functional dependencies, and a political weather system nobody put in writing. It is especially good for leadership teams that need to negotiate better and align faster. It also works as a diagnostic. Six hours of real behaviour tells you more than any survey you were about to commission.

What Happens in the Room

It runs in phases. Early on, factions huddle, pick a strategy and go make first contact. The opening moves are always polite and slightly tentative. Everybody is working out who to trust and how much to give away.

By hour two the alliances are forming. Some announced. Some very much not. The whole tension is that every faction knows something the others need, and deciding when to share it, with whom, and for what price is where the leadership actually lives.

Hour four is my favourite hour. This is where alliances break and hour-one decisions come to collect. The faction that burned a bridge to hit its own target discovers that it now needs that bridge... rather badly. And the quiet person who kept everybody talking, who is nowhere near the top on points? Suddenly the most powerful player in the room.

Nobody wins the last phase alone. The groups who built real trust get there. The groups who played every conversation as a transaction spend the final twenty minutes running around the room. Then we sit down and I connect all of it, beat by beat, to the politics your people are walking back into on Monday.

Specific Patterns That Surface

• Who makes first contact across factions - and whether they open with an offer or a demand
• Who gives information away to build trust, and who sits on it waiting for a better price
• Who becomes the broker, holding good relationships with three factions at once without belonging to any of them
• Whose promises hold up when keeping them gets expensive, and who switches sides the moment the wind does
• How open the politics get. Some rooms play everything in the middle of the floor. Others run a whole second conversation in the corridor
• Whether the group can still act together once everyone's personal goal is already safe. This one is usually the bruise

When to Bring This In

• Senior teams where the politics are quietly wrecking decision quality. The game says the thing out loud so you don't have to
• Post-merger, where two cultures are still politely operating as separate camps. The faction structure mirrors it a little too well
• Organisations that keep having the "alignment" conversation and never resolving it. Here they get to feel what misalignment costs, in one afternoon, with nobody's actual budget on the line
• As a diagnostic before you design something bigger. Six hours of real behaviour beats any survey

When This Isn't the Right Fit

• Groups under 15. You need enough people for the interests to genuinely compete
• Frontline or junior teams. This is built for people who will recognise the dynamics, not meet them for the first time
• Anything shorter than the full six hours. The arc is the product. Cut it to three and everyone leaves just as it was getting good

Where the real learning lands: the debrief

Every session ends on an EPPA debrief - Experience, Patterns, Principles, Application. Nobody walks out with a warm feeling and a worksheet. They walk out with one named behaviour and one named situation to use it in. I run the debrief myself, because I watched every coalition form and every one of them break. That continuity is the whole reason it sticks.

Straight answers about Zombiepuram

Why 6 hours? Can it be shortened?
The 6-hour arc is the product. Alliances forming and fracturing, trust getting built and spent, personal goals colliding with the collective one - that needs time. Squeeze it into 3 and people are only just working out their position when I call time. It's the wrong thing to buy.

What if real political tensions get activated?
Good. That's the debrief's job. I separate what the game surfaced - patterns, tendencies - from what your office holds, which is history and specific people. Making a pattern discussable without making it personal is delicate work, and it needs the person who designed the thing standing in the room. That's me. Every time.

Is it right for teams already in conflict?
Depends what you want. If you want shared language for the friction, Zombiepuram is lovely for that. It moves the dynamic into the game world, where it can be talked about without anybody being accused of anything. If you're trying to settle one specific fight between two people, a game is the wrong tool and I'll say so on the call.

What seniority is it for?
Mid-to-senior. People need to see coalition politics and information asymmetry and think "oh, this is my job". It works through recognition, not novelty.

Bring this to your team

Tell me about your leaders and the politics you're wrestling with. I'll tell you honestly whether Zombiepuram fits, and if it doesn't, I'll tell you that too. No hard sell either way.

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