The queue is growing.
You're on call.
Read the signals. Spend a limited change budget. Restore the service—and prove it is actually recovered.
NO CLOUD ACCOUNT · NO REAL OUTAGE
Fix the bottleneck.
Not just the dashboard.
You have 120 simulated seconds and 18 change credits. Inspect the evidence, make a targeted change, and hold recovery for 12 seconds.
Evidence before intervention.
The queue is rising. The cause has not been inspected. “Inspect evidence” costs one credit and reveals this scenario's signals.
Deferred requests: 0 · A smaller queue is not recovery if requests are still held outside it.
Leave the next responder a trail.
- Start an incident to begin its timeline.
Recovery verified.
How to play / what the simulation actually models
Jobs enter a FIFO queue. Worker throughput depends on replica count, configuration, and storage. Capacity is a simplified model, not a benchmark. Inspecting evidence costs one credit. Actions can have a delay; a timer change takes effect as simulated time advances.
Backpressure holds requests outside the queue rather than deleting them. Disabling it resumes full intake and gradually readmits the deferred requests. You must clear those requests and keep the queue and age gates healthy for 12 seconds before verifying. Service health drops if queued jobs get old or the queue becomes very large.
The clock stops when the page is hidden. Pause gives you time to think; Advance 5s advances exactly five simulated seconds while remaining paused. Reduced-motion preferences stop packet movement without changing the game rules. All state resets on reload. There are no network calls, leaderboards, saved scores, sounds, or real infrastructure actions.
A whole game. One shareable document.
The animation, incident rules, score, and debrief run in this HTML page. There is no game server, installation, or cloud integration behind this example. Share the experience together with its player guide and rules on Marke.st.
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