(COLORADO SPRINGS) — More than 2,000 emergency response personnel from across the country were at the Broadmoor on Wednesday, Nov. 20, to practice how they would react to a high-tech disaster using a board game.

The event was part of the annual International Association of Emergency Managers Conference, and used the “Blackout Game” to help crews practice and improve life-saving measures and natural disaster responses.

Wednesday’s immersive game placed people in the role of emergency managers working to relieve the effects of a multi-day blackout in a city.

“Lots of research has been done in things like war games, training intelligence officers, as an example, to make better decisions with various bits of information,” said Mark Escott, advisor for the Center for Advanced Preparedness and Threat Response Simulation (CAPTRS). “So there’s a lot of history and science behind gamification of these things. So we certainly believe that this will translate in emergency management as well.”

As power and infrastructure systems gradually come back online, players must then figure out how to distribute resources and prioritize emergency responses amid the rolling effects of the long outage.