The Disaster Draw Journal
A Million People and One Road
The game stopped being about volcanoes when I started looking at the corridor
2026-07-25
I started with a simple idea: make a card game about volcano preparedness. I like games that teach you something without turning into a training exercise. Pandemic does this well. You learn how an outbreak moves because the game makes you deal with it.
Then I thought about volcanoes.
A major eruption near Mount Rainier is possible, but it is not the risk people on Route 410 manage every weekend. Most of the time the problems are more ordinary: traffic, fire, flooding, snow, avalanches, rescues, and road damage.
The corridor is busy. Mount Rainier gets roughly 1.6 million visitors a year. Not all of them use 410, but enough do. Rangers manage visitors and wilderness rescues. Fire crews watch the forests. WSDOT repairs roads. Emergency managers plan for a place where the same road carries tourists, skiers, residents, and responders.
Then the risks overlap.
The White River goes over its banks and the road disappears. A fire closes a trailhead. A seismic event raises the risk of landslides. Snow and traffic turn a minor delay into a long night. A volcanic signal may not become an eruption, but it still changes what people are willing to risk.
That became the game.
You have a limited set of cards. The cards are your budget. You use them to respond to different emergencies, but you cannot respond to everything. You can spend on monitoring, road crews, fire response, traffic control, shelters, or public communication. Every decision leaves something else uncovered.
The people managing the corridor work with incomplete information and limited resources. They have to decide whether a risk is serious enough to justify an expensive action before the evidence is perfect.
That is a difficult problem to represent in a game because the correct answer is often, "It depends." Unfortunately, that is also the honest answer.
The corridor is always there. The risks change with the season. The budget does not magically expand because three bad things happened at once.
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