Despite increased awareness of the dangers of wildfires, an alarming number of Californians still aren’t prepared for them. Every year, we’re told to pack go bags, clear out the dried debris around our homes and to keep a full tank of gas when there’s a red flag warning, meaning the potential for fire is high. But how many of us actually do these things? 

The community of Tomales, home to about 250 people, wanted their residents to be prepared in case of a fire. The small, coastal community has unique obstacles including its remoteness and limited resources. Though preventing or mitigating fires is key to keeping people safe, so is preparing them for wildfire evacuations.

But evacuations aren’t as simple as they sound and getting the whole community to do an evacuation drill isn’t exactly practical.  

Thomas Maiorana, an associate professor of design at UC Davis, likes to think through complex problems and try to find practical solutions for them. He and colleagues from UC Davis, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz decided one way to work through the complexities of a wildfire evacuate might be through a board game. 

With Tomales in mind, Maiorana’s team created “Tomales Resilience,” a wildfire evacuation game that uses a map of the community as its game board as well as spinners and chance cards to simulate the unpredictability of a real wildfire. Players play as themselves, getting extra points if they’re signed up for community alerts and a have a go-bag ready and losing points if they have things that could slow them down such as multiple vehicles or pets.  

Maiorana hopes that his wildfire board game, available in both English and Spanish, will help communities come together to figure out how they might prepare for an evacuation long before one is necessary.  

Learning from a real-life wildfire evacuation  

Research assistant and recent UC Davis graduate Ciel Wood evacuated her home near Redding back in 2016 when the Carr Fire burned more than 200,000 acres in Shasta and Trinity counties. At just 16, Wood didn’t know much about wildfires or how climate change was exacerbating their effects. Though her family’s home was safe, she knew many people who lost their homes completely in the blaze.  

“We were there driving back from a camping trip cut short, of course, and the sky was just like orange and black and ashy. It kind of felt like you were driving into Hell, so it was really terrifying.”  — Ciel Wood, Class of 2024

Wood, who has been working on the project with Maiorana since spring 2023, did a lot of the preliminary research for the game’s development, including turning to those she knew. She remembers her family noting increased traffic as one condition they hadn’t anticipated.  

“If everyone is trying to get out of the same place at the same time, you are not going to be driving on free roads – it's going to be congested,” said Wood, who double majored in design and cognitive science. That’s one of the reasons the game encourages players to take only one vehicle or risk all players having to skip a turn via a random chance card at any point in the game. “If everyone’s bringing two cars, that’s twice as many cars on the road.”  

That traffic, Wood said, slows down the evacuation for all players or, in real life, evacuees. 

Changing conditions effect wildfire behavior

Wildfires are a unique natural disaster. For one, they are often unnatural, caused by human error or neglect. Secondly, they’re largely unpredictable, dependent upon the weather, the wind direction, and existing conditions on the ground. It can seem like a wildfire is heading one direction, then suddenly, the wind shifts, pushing the blaze into another community. 

“A large, rapidly developing wildfire is very dynamic,” said Senior Fire Capt. Tom Nunes, Marin County Fire Department. While structural fires, like a warehouse fire, are usually contained to whatever building is burning, he said, wildfires are more dependent upon external conditions.  

Nunes has been at the Tomales station for a decade and in fire service for 36 years — and he’s been on the front lines of some of the largest wildfires in California.  

“Every fire starts small, whether its lightning, whether its arson, whether it’s a car that ran into the field with a hot exhaust or something, everything starts small — and on a cool, overcast foggy morning, the first arriving units can probably find it and keep it small, but if it’s a sunny day, if it’s a hot afternoon, three days of low humidity and strong, dry wind, now that same ignition becomes an entirely different animal with entirely different dynamics,” Nunes said.  

One of Nunes’ favorite things about Maiorana’s game is how it takes these variables into account. 

Spinners, like in The Game of Life, determine how large the fire is, its location, the wind direction, and what day of the week and time of day it is. Meanwhile, a variety of “chance” cards (think: Monopoly) determine what other conditions players will face. Some cards may apply to a wildfire anywhere like encountering a tree down in the road, intense traffic, heavy smoke or extreme heat. Other cards were designed specifically with community of Tomales in mind, including large events that bring more people and vehicles into the area, like a seafood festival, or a car commercial being filmed on one of their remote roads. The map itself, the game’s board, is of the Tomales community: its roads, landmarks and geography.  

“On this map, the fire could be anywhere,” Maiorana said. “You could play it multiple times and have an entirely different scenario, which is exactly how fires work.” 

The game allows for repetition in a pragmatic way that a large-scale evacuation drill or another type of wildfire simulation exercise may not.  

Building resilience for the future  

When under high stress, we don’t always make the best decisions. As Maiorana sees it, simulating what we might do in a stressful situation can be an effective way to prepare for those situations and build resilience ahead of time. "Tomales Resilience” is meant to get people thinking about the potential obstacles they may face in the case if a real evacuation but with minimal stress, the kind that comes with competitive gameplay.  

“Even though there’s no fire involved, it’s a simulation. In many ways, it’s still a way that has some visceral experience of the tension or the stress of a wildfire, without it having the risk and damaging potential,” Maiorana said. 

His hope is that, by playing out these scenarios ahead of time and potentially taking advance measure to prepare for a potential wildfire, individuals will be able to be more confident in themselves when and if one occurs and be more creative in their response to it.  

“If you’re just so stressed out and basically in fear mode, you’re not going to be able to be very creative. If you’re worried about making a mistake, you’re not going to be able to be creative. And understandably, if you’re in a life-or-death situation, you don’t want to make a mistake – there's no room for that." — Tom Maiorana

"So, this is about creating more of a permissive space where people can try on different behaviors or talk through the options," Maiorana said. "It’s really about making the process of wrestling with this hard stuff a little bit more enjoyable, making it more like a puzzle rather than homework."

In June, Maiorana and his team tested their prototype — and the theory behind it — on the town that inspired it, Tomales. 

Community involvement in disaster preparedness  

The day of the event, all six tables in Tomales Town Hall were filled with community members interested in playing the game that had been custom made for them. At each table, local fire personnel played the role of “the fire” using the spinners to determine the fire’s behavior, and were available to help residents work through situations they encountered.  

“I saw some really impassioned discussions,” Nunes said. “I saw a lot of people light up at the realizations they were making.” 

Though people disagreed sometimes on the course of action they should take, the discussions remained lively yet civil. There was even some laughter.  

“There was good creative tension about what we could do and how folks should address this challenge, but I thought it was super encouraging to see that it’s not about finding agreement but about finding a space to have that conversation so that folks can get to better alignment,” Maiorana said. “That was really inspiring for me.” 

While 40 people may not seem like a lot, in a community as small as Tomales, it is sizable — about 15% of the year-round population. What was notable to Maiorana was how engaged community members were and how long they stayed after the game was over.  

“It gets people thinking and, by using play, it seems to facilitate a freer thought process or a more engaged process of discussing these things,” Nunes said. “It was a good self-assessment and it initiated some conversation about future ideas on what to do, what are some measures the community can do, what individuals can do and how to be better prepared.” 

The community has since had a follow-up workshop with Maiorana to discuss how they might implement some of the ideas the game elicited in a real-life evacuation. Maiorana left a copy of the board game behind with the community. It will be among the games available during their monthly "table game night," which increases the chance of the game reaching more people.  

“In the end, it was quite successful,” Nunes said. “What’s cool is the board – the map – is specific to the area, this was the greater Tomales village but this could easily be done for Point Reyes Station, Atherton in Novato or anywhere really. If it makes it relevant to those who live and work there, it kick-starts a thought process on what-ifs and how folks can prepare themselves if something were to happen.” 

Making a custom designed map for every community that needs it or wants it, though, may not be feasible or practical. As they continue to develop the game, Maiorana and his research assistants are figuring out ways to make production more efficient and explore ways the game could help more people. 

Impact and applications beyond Tomales 

KQED’s coverage of the “Tomales Resilience” event ended up airing on NPR, prompting responses from communities across the country. Groups from at least 20 different states — Florida, Georgia, Nebraska and Hawaii among them — have contacted the team about getting a game for their communities. And not just for wildfires. People are interested in how similar games might help them prepare for all sorts of disaster recovery.  

Though this iteration of the board game is based on Tomales, Maiorana and his research assistants are working on adapting the game in a few ways including creating a print-n-play option, which people could customize and print themselves; creating generic boards that could be used in any coastal, mountainous or other type of community; and finding a way to quickly create custom maps for those communities that want them.  

They may even explore how to create similar games for other types of disasters, though that may require something entirely different because floods, hurricanes and earthquakes don’t quite act like wildfires.  

Maiorana hopes to continue to connect with local agencies, organizations and state emergency operation services so that the game can reach, and ultimately help, more people. Even if it all it does is facilitate a conversation about how to prepare for an evacuation, that may be more thought than someone had previously given the topic.  

Maiorana sees the game as a step in the right direction. 

“I would love to see it get into the hands of as many people as possible because, I think, the question for me is not whether or not it’s going to be beneficial but how beneficial it will be,” he said. “I'm pretty confident just getting people to play with it is going to start something.”