More than 30 members of the Feliz Creek & Road 110 Firewise Community gathered at the Hopland firehouse on a Sunday morning to play an evacuation board game designed to help them prepare for a real wildfire emergency. The game, called Mendocino County Wildfire Resilience, is a local adaptation of a game that first appeared in Marin County in 2024, created by a UC Davis team named Prototyping Resilience, led by Associate Professor Tom Maiorana and funded in part by the National Science Foundation.
The board featured a large map of the Feliz Creek area with road names and evacuation zone information. Players began by completing a worksheet about their actual fire preparedness level, which determined their starting positions.
Scott Cratty, Executive Director of the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council, explained that some players started with negative points because they lacked a written evacuation plan or a Go-bag. Cratty noted that certain hindrances are beyond control, such as the number of pets or people in a household, and advised that those with many pets should start preparations early to speed up the evacuation process.
After establishing their starting positions, players rolled a die to advance toward safety but also had to draw chance cards that introduced obstacles like downed trees, new spot fires, or missing medications in their Go-bag. Maria Esser, a Grizzly Corps fellow with the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council, described a card that forces players to choose between warning a neighbor on foot, which skips a turn, or leaving them uninformed.
Another card lightly shames players with wooden fences attached to their houses, deducting two moves from their roll.
The game created a low-stakes environment for discussing serious topics. Neighbors shared knowledge about dangerous road spots, confusing signage, and wind patterns.
Bernadette Byrne, a community member, found the experience surprisingly impactful, noting that chance cards brought up overlooked issues like whether she had a radio and batteries. She highlighted the reality of limited escape routes in their community, saying, 'In communities such as ours, there’s one egress and one ingress, and so you hope you can move the right way.' The event reinforced neighborly bonds and practical preparedness, with Esser summarizing, '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.'