MENDOCINO CO., 6/16/26 — Preparing to survive a life-or-death emergency can be good, lighthearted fun with the neighbors. That was the case on the last day of May at the Hopland firehouse, where over thirty members of the Feliz Creek & Road 110 Firewise Community got together to play an evacuation board game.
The board was a large map of the Feliz Creek area, complete with road names and information about evacuation zones. Players established their starting positions by filling out a worksheet about their current level of fire preparedness — in real life.
The game uses real-life information, mixed with hypothetical but realistic situations, to help people assess what obstacles might arise and how to be prepared if they had to flee their homes. At Mendocino County Fire Safe Council Executive Director Scott Cratty’s table, several players started with negative points, because they did not possess a written evacuation plan — or even a go-bag packed with clothes, medications and papers.
When reviewing their startup assessments, Cratty told the players, “These are things that will give you a head start or be a hindrance. On the hindrance side, some of them are things you can’t control, like the number of pets you have or number of people in your household.”
Cratty explained that people with several pets needed to get on the ball fast. “Get their food gathered up, get the horses in the trailer. Those are all things that are going to make your evacuation process take longer, which means you need to do a better job being alert and ready and starting sooner.”
He encouraged everyone to sign up for multiple alerts, through Nixle, Watch Duty, and the county’s emergency services. If one alert system fails, another one may be functioning the way it should.
Once players knew how far ahead or behind they were, they rolled a die to see how many steps they could advance towards safety. But of course it wasn’t that simple. They also had to draw chance cards, which presented obstacles like downed trees, new spot fires, or not having needed medications in their go-bag.
Maria Esser, the Grizzly Corps fellow with the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council, described a chance card that sounds like a problem in an ethics class. “If you don’t have the phone number or contact information of your neighbor written down somewhere or memorized, you have to go warn them on foot about the fire.” In the game, you have to skip a turn if you choose to warn them, because that takes time.
Some cards were a reminder. “There’s one that does a little bit of light public shaming,” Esser said. “If anyone at the table has a wooden fence connected to their house, then that person gets two moves knocked off of their roll.”
A way to help people think clearly when the stakes are low
The game, Mendocino County Wildfire Resilience, is a local adaptation of a game that debuted in Marin County in 2024. It was created by a UC Davis team called Prototyping Resilience, led by associate professor Tom Maiorana. The project was funded in part by grants from the National Science Foundation.
It’s designed to create a fun, low-stress opportunity to prepare for a situation where people are often too terrified to think clearly. At Hopland, it worked. Neighbors discussed an especially dangerous spot in the road where trees encroach on the already narrow thoroughfare, and they updated one another on signage in a confusing maze of roads between Hopland and McNab Ranch. They knew which way the wind blows where, and which redundantly named road runs past whose property.
Bernadette Byrne, who is part of the Feliz Creek & Road 110 Firewise Community, said she thought the game was surprisingly impactful. ”The chance cards brought up lots of obstacles, issues, circumstances that you might not be thinking about, and then you’re like, `Oh, right. Do I have that radio? Do I have the batteries nearby?’”
At her table, a downed tree presented an impossible choice. “Change direction, if you’re fortunate enough to have multiple directions to change to,” she reflected. “In communities such as ours, there’s one egress and one ingress, and so you hope you can move the right way, because there’s not a lot of options.”
Byrne was proud of her community for showing up and being so willing to share information. “We have had that for all of our meetings,” she reported. “We know each other and really would work together to support each other in the case of an emergency.”
The objective, in playing a fun board game with friends and neighbors, is not that different from helping one another stay alive. Esser made that point: “The goal is to get to safety. But the overarching goal is to think about possible roadblocks that you might come across in the case of a real evacuation.”
For more information about how you can prepare for a successful evacuation or get involved with your neighborhood Fire Safe Council or Firewise Community, visit firesafemendocino.org.
Sarah Reith writes for the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council.