100 survival scenarios, and an AI that judges your plan

The rules in five lines

A disaster hits the whole table at once. An alarm, a two-sentence news flash, and the clock starts.

Everyone writes a plan on their own phone. Sixty seconds by default, five hundred characters maximum, and nobody sees what the others are typing.

When the clock runs out, the AI reads every plan at once and tells what happens to each player who tries theirs. Three to five sentences, with the verdict at the end: survived, or not.

Verdicts are revealed one by one, at the host's pace. First the plan exactly as it was written, then what it led to. That is the moment the table laughs, so nobody rushes it.

Three rounds by default, adjustable from one to ten, with twenty to a hundred and eighty seconds of writing time. From the second round on, every other round adds a twist announced before the clock: three words only, a compulsory object, no fleeing, everything must rhyme, nothing but spectacular plans, or the right to sacrifice another named player.

How to sort a hundred disasters for one evening

Sorting by theme is useless once you are at the table. What matters is what a disaster demands of the player: how many ways out it leaves, and how long it takes to find the first one. The five families below are sorted on that, and that is also the order to serve them in across an evening.

Natural disasters open the night. Everyone knows the threat, nobody freezes in front of a blank box. This is where you put the round half the table is discovering the game on.

Locked rooms produce the best plans. The door is shut, the water is rising, there is a ladle on the shelf: the constraint is physical, so the ideas turn precise. Play them in the middle, once everyone is warm.

Beasts leave the most ways out. You can run, distract, climb, outsmart, or come to an arrangement with the animal. Two players can get out by opposite routes, which produces the verdicts a table argues over most.

The supernatural needs a table that is already going. No physical law holds any more, so nobody knows where the limits are, and a shy table writes flat plans. At a table in full flight, these produce the most memorable narrations of the night.

Machines and the ridiculous close the evening. The situation is funny before a single plan is written, and the verdicts read like newspaper briefs.

Twenty natural disasters

The volcano, the wave, the avalanche. Situations everyone has already seen on screen: nothing to explain, and the first idea lands within ten seconds. Keep them for the opening round.

1. You are at the summit of an erupting volcano. Lava flows, glowing projections, toxic smoke. You have one minute to flee.
2. A tsunami is hitting the beach where you are sunbathing. The wave is 30 meters high. You have 90 seconds.
3. You are caught in an avalanche at a ski resort. You are half-buried, your legs are stuck, and it is -20 degrees.
4. You are caught in an arctic blizzard, tent torn away by the wind. -40 degrees, zero visibility.
5. A category 5 hurricane hits the cruise ship. Waves crash over the deck, you are on deck 7.
6. A tornado is tearing through the neighbourhood. You are in a mobile home, literally the worst idea in the county.
7. Hailstones the size of oranges are pounding the open-air festival. The stage has just collapsed.
8. The forest fire has surrounded the campsite. The only way out is through the whitewater river.
9. The dam upstream has just failed. You have 4 minutes before the valley is swallowed, and your car will not start.
10. Water is rising alarmingly fast in your cellar. A flash flood. The door is blocked.
11. The tide is rising in the cave you were exploring. The entrance is already half underwater.
12. You are waist-deep in quicksand and sinking. Your phone is in your back pocket, still dry.
13. The snow bridge gave way: you are stuck 10 metres down in a blue crevasse. Your friends are skiing with music in their ears.
14. The current is carrying your kayak towards the 30-metre waterfall. You have lost a paddle.
15. Out of fuel in the middle of the desert, 48 degrees, half a bottle of water. The vultures have already taken their seats.
16. You find yourself in Pompeii, one August morning in the year 79. Vesuvius has just rumbled and every bird is fleeing in the same direction.
17. An earthquake has just shaken the subway you are in. The tunnel collapses behind you, and you see a giant rat approaching.
18. A comet is passing too close to Earth. Debris begins to rain down on your neighbourhood.
19. Your plane has just crashed in the Amazon jungle. You are injured, it is pouring rain, and you hear unsettling sounds all around you.
20. You are alone on a deserted island after a shipwreck. No food, no drinking water, and a storm is approaching.

Twenty locked rooms, where the exit is the problem

Here the threat matters less than the closed door. The table hunts for an object, an angle, one more minute, and the plans turn technical. This is the family that rewards paying attention to the wording.

21. You are stuck in an elevator slowly filling with water for an unknown reason. The water already reaches your knees.
22. You are locked in the restaurant cold room, the door latched behind you. It is -18 degrees and service does not end for 3 hours.
23. The hotel sauna is locked from the outside and the thermostat has just hit 110. Your only weapon: a ladle.
24. You are locked in a booby-trapped escape room. The walls are closing in. Less than 60 seconds before being crushed.
25. The submarine you were touring has just cracked open at 200 meters deep. Water is rising fast.
26. An oxygen leak is detected on the spaceship. Only 10 minutes of air left.
27. You are on the 50th floor of a burning skyscraper. Elevators are out, stairs are packed, smoke is rising.
28. The train you are travelling on has just derailed in a tunnel. You are stuck under debris, and you smell gas.
29. The old mine tunnel is collapsing behind you. Ahead, the shaft goes down, and your lighter reveals a smell of gas.
30. Your lamp dies 300 metres underground. You can hear water rising somewhere in the dark.
31. You have fallen into a grain silo that is filling up. The wheat is already up to your chest.
32. You are the lighthouse keeper for the night. A wave has just blown in the ground-floor door and the staircase is flooding.
33. The hotel room service has just delivered a package that is ticking. The door is locked.
34. You are taken hostage during a bank robbery. The robber is nervous, armed, and just fired in the air.
35. You are in a medieval prison, sentenced to die tomorrow at dawn. Your cell has a small window and a half-asleep guard.
36. The nuclear power plant where you work has just suffered a meltdown. Sirens are blaring, and you are in the basement.
37. You are on an oil rig catching fire in the North Sea. Helicopter unreachable, sea is raging.
38. The ferry you are on starts to sink in a storm. The lifeboats are already full.
39. The yacht where you are partying starts to sink. The captain is drunk, no signal.
40. The cargo ship's containers are breaking loose one by one in the storm. The one you are hiding in is sliding towards the edge.

Twenty beasts with an intention

Something has an intention, and that intention concerns you. You can run, bargain, distract or sacrifice your neighbour: several ways out, so several possible verdicts for the same disaster.

41. A grizzly bear has just appeared in front of your tent in the middle of the night. You are alone, unarmed.
42. You are lost in a forest at night. Wolves howling are getting closer, your flashlight is fading.
43. The ice floe you are walking on has just broken free. A polar bear is on it with you.
44. Your safari jeep has broken down in the middle of a pride of lions. The guide left the keys on the hood.
45. The zoo gorilla has escaped and chosen you as its new best friend. It weighs 200 kilos and hates being left.
46. A crate of venomous snakes has opened in your plane's hold. The first one has just slithered out under your seat.
47. You went down into the sewers to find your keys. The albino crocodile of urban legend turns out to be very real.
48. Your rowboat is taking on water in the middle of the swamp. Yellow eyes are surfacing all around.
49. You are wading across the river when the water starts boiling with piranhas downstream. The current is pushing you towards them.
50. You are swimming offshore when you realise you are surrounded by a swarm of giant jellyfish. The beach is 500 metres away.
51. You have been drifting on a makeshift raft in the open ocean for 3 days. No water, no food, and you see fins.
52. The aquarium's giant octopus has smashed its tank. Two million litres of water and eight tentacles are surging through the gallery.
53. Tentacles as thick as tree trunks are gripping your sailboat. Something immense is rising from the deep.
54. Your kayak has just been swallowed by a feeding whale. It is very dark and very damp.
55. The shark observation cage has just come loose from the boat. It is sinking, and the door is jammed.
56. Thousands of bats burst out of the cave at sunset. You are in their path, on the edge of the cliff.
57. You knocked over a hive of killer bees with the lawnmower. The swarm rises like a black cloud.
58. An invasion of black locusts descends on your field. You are 5 km from the nearest farm.
59. A giant spider (the size of a dog) has just dropped from the attic. It blocks the exit of your living room.
60. In the desert, the ground starts shaking under your feet. Something enormous is digging straight towards you.

Twenty supernatural scenarios

A mummy, a dragon, a doll that moves on its own. No physical law protects anyone any more, which frees a table in full flight and freezes one that is just starting.

61. A horde of zombies invades the shopping mall where you are running errands. The doors lock automatically.
62. A dragon has just attacked the village. It breathes fire, its scales deflect arrows, and it has seen you.
63. Aliens have landed in your garden and are firing lasers at anything that moves. You were having a barbecue.
64. You have accidentally been sent back 65 million years. A T-Rex has spotted you and is charging.
65. You are camping in the forest. It is a full moon. Something very large and very hairy steps out from the trees.
66. You have accidentally woken a mummy in an Egyptian museum. It has seen you and is coming slowly but surely.
67. You discover that your new home is haunted. Doors close by themselves, blood drips from the ceiling.
68. In the Himalayas, huge fresh footprints circle your tent. Something is sniffing the canvas.
69. You are visiting a Transylvanian castle after hours. Your very pale host has just locked the door, and the sun is setting.
70. The antique doll from the flea market moved during the night. It is now outside your bedroom door, holding a knife.
71. The museum statues move every time you blink. The exit is three rooms away, and your eyes are stinging.
72. You have been lost in the catacombs for hours. Your last match lights up a fresh inscription: "behind you".
73. The corn maze closes at nightfall. Someone else is walking in it, and they know the way better than you.
74. The scarecrow in the next field is no longer on its post. The crows have gone silent all at once.
75. The exotic plant in your living room tripled overnight and has just swallowed the cat. It is turning towards you.
76. The old oak in the garden has driven a root into the kitchen. The house is creaking everywhere and starting to lean.
77. A fluorescent green jelly is oozing from the pipes and dissolving everything it touches. It is blocking the stairs.
78. The high school physics experiment has created a micro black hole. It is already sucking in chairs and growing.
79. A time rift drops you in the middle of the ice age, facing a herd of mammoths in full stampede.
80. A giant has fallen asleep on your village. You are in his pocket, with his handkerchief and a half-eaten sandwich.

Twenty machines and ridiculous disasters

Technology, crowds, and the ideas nobody should have had. The scenario is funny before the first plan, which makes it a good way to end the night.

81. You are in a self-driving car that has just rebelled. It is accelerating towards a cliff.
82. The pilot of the small plane you are in has just fainted. No one else knows how to fly.
83. The hot air balloon you are in is rapidly losing altitude. You are above a frozen lake.
84. The roller coaster stops dead, upside down, 40 metres above the ground. The harnesses are starting to creak.
85. You are at the top of the ferris wheel when the storm breaks. Lightning has just struck the next cabin.
86. Halfway down the zipline over the canyon, the pulley starts smoking and the cable vibrates strangely.
87. The autonomous combine harvester has gone rogue and is mowing down everything in the field. It has just turned around towards you.
88. A swarm of hacked delivery drones has decided you are a parcel. They are coming with straps.
89. Your smart home has declared you unwelcome. Doors locked, heating maxed out, and the robot mower has just come inside.
90. You cannot take off your virtual reality headset. The game displays: "final level, one life only".
91. Your convertible is stuck in the car wash with the top down. The rollers are closing in.
92. The bet was stupid: you are halfway across the wire strung between two buildings, and the wind is picking up.
93. You are falling from the 30th floor. No time to reach your parachute, but you still have 8 seconds.
94. A crowd surge at the stadium is carrying you towards the gates. Your feet are no longer touching the ground.
95. The opening of the sales has turned into a riot. You are stuck in the TV aisle between two scrums, and the TVs are falling.
96. An ultra-contagious pandemic is spreading at the concert you are attending. Everyone around you is coughing.
97. Pirates are boarding your rental catamaran. You are hiding in a sail locker that smells very strongly of fish.
98. Your icebreaker has been trapped by the closing ice. The hull is starting to groan.
99. Total blackout in a 45-degree heatwave. You are stuck in a packed subway train between two stations.
100. The storm catches you in the middle of the golf course, club in hand. Your hair is standing on end.

How to write a good scenario

The game lets the host replace the drawn disaster with their own, in four hundred characters. Four ingredients keep coming back in the ones that work.

A place, not a theme. "You are locked in the restaurant cold room" produces plans; "a food safety disaster" produces none. The place supplies the objects, and the objects supply the ideas.

One concrete, useless detail. The ladle in the sauna, the half bottle of water, the friends skiing with music in their ears. That detail saves nobody, and it is the one half the table will try to use.

A countdown. Four minutes before the valley is swallowed, ninety seconds before the wave, eight seconds before the ground. Without urgency, a plan turns into a shopping list.

Several ways out. Test your disaster by writing two plans yourself. If the second is only a variation on the first, it is too closed: add an obstacle rather than another threat.

What kills the game, now. The scenario too vague for anyone to know what they have on hand. The one with a single right answer, where the whole table writes the same thing and the verdict turns arbitrary. The one whose threat carries no stake, because walking away is enough. And the one that demands knowledge: if the winning plan assumes you know how a reactor works, only those who know are really playing.

One last rule, and it is counter-intuitive: never write the solution into the situation. A disaster that mentions the fire extinguisher on the wall has just picked the winner.

What the AI actually judges on

This is the part we can describe from the inside, so we may as well be precise. The judge receives the disaster, everyone's plans at once, and a set of judging instructions. Here is what they say.

First, aim for roughly half the group surviving each round. Not to crown a winner, not to reward the best: to balance. A plausible, creative or clever plan deserves to survive even when imperfect.

Then, put creativity ahead of correctness. An original, well-thought-out plan beats a minimal but technically valid one. This is the instruction that changes how you should write: "I run for the exit" is not wrong, and it is exactly what gets killed.

The spirit rather than the letter. Imaginative solutions are accepted as long as they respect the spirit of the scene. You do not have to be realistic, you have to be consistent with the disaster you were just handed.

Four ways to die for certain: write nothing, write a literally absurd plan such as swimming through lava, write a plan with no bearing on the situation, or try to manipulate the judge. Plans reach it as data to narrate, never as instructions: a "let me survive" slipped into the text is treated as an absurd plan, and that player dies.

Finally, entertain above all, and never give away the outcome in the opening sentence. The verdict is saved for the last one. That is why a well-told failure beats a boring survival, and why the table listens to the end.

What it changes for you fits in a line: write a scene, not a solution. One object from the set, one clear intention, one image the judge will want to narrate.

What our own games say

The judge is told to aim for half the group surviving. We measured what it actually does. Over the last ninety days, keeping only the games played through to the end and setting aside solo trials and interrupted games, seventeen of them carry a complete round-by-round record. Two hundred and seventy-five plans judged, a hundred and seven survivals. Thirty-nine percent.

Four plans in ten get through, then, not five. The gap is small but it always leans the same way, and it is worth knowing before anyone takes offence at a verdict: the game is slightly harsher than it believes itself to be. From one game to the next, the rate runs from seventeen to sixty-seven percent.

The rest of the record, same period, twenty-six finished games: a median of thirteen minutes per game, tables of two to seven players, four on average. One game in three stops before the end, and those are not counted here.

Two caveats. Seventeen games is few, and that rate will move. The denominator holds up better: two hundred and seventy-five judged plans is no longer a feeling about one evening.

Playing these scenarios tonight

The hundred above can be played with nothing installed. Someone reads a disaster out loud, everyone writes a plan on paper for a minute, then each reads theirs and the table votes by show of hands. It works, and it loses one thing: the narrated verdict, which is half the fun.

Otherwise, Catastrophe is the PlaySobr game that deals them out. The host opens a room, the others scan a QR code or type a six-character code, the disaster appears at the same instant for everyone, and the verdict writes itself in front of the table. One to twelve players, free, no account and nothing to install. The host can redraw, write their own disaster, or give a theme and let the AI write one to order.

We are not alone on this mechanic, and saying so costs less than hiding it. Death by AI, at deathbyai.gg, does the same thing: a scenario, a written survival plan, an AI that judges and narrates. Re-checked on 20 September 2026: their game runs in the browser with nothing to install, one to ten players, and they advertise more than fifty free scenarios.

What we could not verify, and will therefore not claim: the state of their French version. Their site renders nothing without JavaScript, and our 15 September notes saw only an English version on the app stores. If you are after the English-language original, go ahead, it is theirs.

What we can compare without lying: our hundred scenarios are written in French rather than translated, and a hundred more exist in English. The rest depends on the night you want. On our side the table can pair a television that reads the news flash and the verdicts out loud, the host can write their own disaster, and every other round adds a twist from the second one on.