Everything you need to get the most out of the Emergency Exercise Simulator.
The Emergency Exercise Simulator is a tabletop decision-making exercise for multi-agency emergency response teams. It puts you in the seat of a specific responder role during a realistic incident and asks you to make the decisions that role actually faces — under time pressure, with incomplete information, and with consequences that carry forward.
It is designed to be picked up off the shelf with no facilitator, no prior preparation, and no specialist knowledge required. A single run takes around 20–30 minutes.
Operation Ashdown — A wildfire on Brynmoor Hill threatens residential areas, critical infrastructure, and a care home. You manage the response from initial activation through to recovery.
Operation Solstice — A severe Level 4 heatwave event triggers a city-wide public health emergency, with mass heat casualties, vulnerable residents at risk, and cooling centre demand outstripping supply.
Before play begins, you are shown two framing scenarios: a Strategic Worst Case (the catastrophic ceiling — full Gold/SCG activation, mass casualty, critical infrastructure loss) and a Tactical Realistic Worst Case (the scenario you actually play — serious but manageable, with resource pressure and time stress).
This framing helps you calibrate your response — neither overreacting nor underplaying the incident.
Decisions compound. A poor call in Phase 1 will follow you into Phase 3. The exercise is designed to reward early, proportionate action — exactly as real incidents do.
Each scenario is structured into four phases that mirror the lifecycle of a real multi-agency incident — from the first alert through to recovery handover. Each phase presents a set of decisions appropriate to that stage.
Some Phase 3 and Phase 4 scenarios are branched — meaning the situation you face is partly determined by the decisions you made earlier. A poor Phase 1 activation decision, for example, might result in Phase 3 presenting a more constrained resource picture.
This is intentional. It reflects how real incidents work: early decisions foreclose later options. The exercise is designed so that players who get the early phases right have more tools available when the pressure peaks.
In Operation Ashdown, a fire progression map appears between phases, showing how the fire has spread and which assets are now at risk. These maps are not decorative — they provide the situational update that real Gold and Silver commanders would receive at a command briefing, and the next phase's decisions reflect the updated picture.
Each question presents a situation and three options. There are no trick answers. Every option reflects a real approach that has been used in actual incidents — some better than others.
The textbook response: proportionate, timely, and aligned with JESIP and national guidance. Typically improves one or more of the four consequence bars. Explained in the feedback with the reasoning behind it.
A defensible decision that is not wrong, but misses the optimal response — often because it is too slow, too cautious, or addresses only part of the problem. Consequence bars may shift slightly. Common in ambiguous situations where the evidence supports multiple approaches.
An approach that is actively harmful, bypasses the command structure, or reflects a common misunderstanding of agency responsibilities. Consequence bars shift unfavourably. Detailed feedback explains what went wrong and why.
A small number of questions are branching points. The situation you face in a later phase will be subtly different depending on which option you chose here. Branching is not telegraphed — you will not know at the time that a question is a branch trigger. This is deliberate: real decisions rarely come with a warning that they will constrain future options.
After the exercise, the debrief screen identifies questions where branching occurred and explains what changed as a result.
Some questions have a countdown timer, shown as a red bar draining across the top of the screen. These simulate decisions that have a real deadline — a resource that must be pre-positioned, a window of opportunity that closes.
If the timer expires before you choose, the question is scored as a timeout — equivalent to making no decision. In real incidents, not deciding in time is itself a decision with consequences. Timeout answers appear in your debrief in red.
Timed questions are most common in Phases 2 and 3. The timer duration reflects the realistic decision window for that type of choice — some are 30 seconds, some are 90.
After every answer, you receive a feedback card explaining why the best option was optimal, what the others got wrong, and — where applicable — the JESIP principle or national guidance that underpins the decision.
Feedback is a core part of the learning experience. Even if you chose correctly, read it — the reasoning is often as valuable as the answer.
The exercise uses the Gold/Silver/Bronze command structure used in UK emergency response. Gold commands strategically, Silver coordinates tactically, Bronze delivers operationally. Each level has different decisions, different information, and different responsibilities.
Sets overall strategy and authorises resources beyond normal capacity. Chairs the Strategic Coordinating Group (SCG). Makes decisions the public and ministers will later scrutinise. Does not manage tactical detail.
Translates Gold strategy into coordinated tactical action. Chairs the Tactical Coordinating Group (TCG). Resolves conflicts between Bronze agencies. Manages the operational picture across the scene.
Delivers the response on the ground — fire suppression, cordon management, casualty treatment, infrastructure isolation. Reports upward to Silver. Makes fast operational decisions within the tactical framework set by Silver.
Each role faces a completely different set of decisions — playing the same scenario as two different roles is a very different exercise. For group use, consider assigning roles to match participants' actual jobs, or deliberately assigning unfamiliar roles to build cross-agency empathy. The exercise works for both.
Your performance is tracked in two ways: a points score for your individual decisions, and four consequence bars that represent the cumulative impact of your choices on the incident outcome.
Four bars run continuously during the exercise, starting at a low baseline and rising or falling with each decision. They represent real dimensions of incident harm:
If a bar reaches a critical level, a threshold event triggers — a branching consequence that changes the scenario you face. A high Life Safety score, for example, might trigger a mass casualty event in the next phase. These triggers are not announced in advance.
Each question scores 0–20 points. Your total score across all questions maps to an outcome label:
| 20 | Textbook JESIP | Optimal response — exactly right |
| 16 | Excellent Call | Strong decision with minor trade-offs |
| 12 | Solid Decision | Good but not optimal |
| 8 | Costly Delay | Defensible but creates downstream problems |
| 4 | Serious Error | Actively harmful or structurally wrong |
| 0 | Critical Failure | Catastrophic — undermines the whole response |
| — | Time Expired | No decision made — treated as critical failure |
At the end of the exercise, your total points across all questions produce a final outcome rating — from Exemplary Command down to Systemic Failure. This is based on the percentage of maximum possible score, not a fixed threshold, so a difficult role played well is recognised as such.
Each question includes a situation panel showing current conditions, resource status, and time of day. The right answer often depends on details buried in that panel — what resources are already deployed, what the scene commander has already reported, how many hours have elapsed.
A decision that scores partial credit can still push a consequence bar into the critical zone, triggering a threshold event. A high score with a spiked coordination bar is a different outcome from a high score with all bars green. The bars are the real performance measure.
There is no guessing pattern — the best answer is never always A, B, or C. Approach each question as you would in a real briefing: what does this situation actually require, and what is within my role's authority to decide?
Gold does not manage Bronze. Bronze does not set strategic objectives. Many poor answers involve stepping outside your command level — making Gold decisions as a Bronze commander, or micromanaging operations as a Gold commander. If an answer feels like it belongs to a different level, it probably does.
The exercise consistently rewards early, proportionate action over cautious delay. Waiting for certainty before mobilising resources, convening SCG, or issuing warnings is the most common way to accumulate poor scores. In emergency response, late-but-correct is usually worse than early-and-slightly-over.
The exercise works well as a group debrief tool: play solo, then compare answers with colleagues. Disagreements about the correct option are often the most productive conversations — especially across agency boundaries, where role assumptions diverge. The debrief screen exports a full answer log to share.
Playing as the Tactical Commander after playing as the Fire Commander — or vice versa — reveals how decisions look different depending on where you sit in the command structure. This cross-role perspective is one of the most effective things you can do with the exercise in a team setting.
The exercise includes prompts to consider your own organisation's emergency response plan and business continuity arrangements. These are not rhetorical — bring your actual plan to the table and test it against the scenario. The gaps you find are the most useful output of the exercise.
The debrief screen appears automatically when you finish. It shows your score breakdown by question, all consequence bar final values, the full answer log with feedback, and an option to export results for a facilitator-led debrief.
If you are using this as part of a planned exercise, share the export with your exercise lead — it provides a structured record of decision quality that can be used to identify training priorities across your team.