The Fun of Continued Training
Training is a crucial aspect of any job imaginable, but if there’s one profession where training really matters, it’s firefighting. For the men and women who charge into danger for the sake of others, proper training to make sure each dangerous situation is as safe as possible is crucial. Luckily, all firefighters, whether they be professionals or volunteers, go through extensive and ongoing training.
For most firehouses, training is done in a hands-on, practical fashion. This means equipment is moved outside and drills are run for the entire crew. But what happens if the weather doesn’t want to cooperate with the firehouse’s training plans? In those instances, a fun new game called Fireground could be just the thing to hit the spot. Developed by a Training Officer from New York, the game is designed to help firefighters train until they can’t get it wrong. And supporters of the game can earn their very own custom bottle opener challenge coin!
Blurring the Line Between Training and Fun
It was the problem of holding a drill during inclimate weather that led Marlene Tuczinski to create Fireground. During our interview, Tuczinski mentioned the myriad of different ways a drill could be forced indoors. And for certain fire companies, that’s doable because their bay is large and clean enough that they can still drill certain things inside. But nothing’s quite like drilling outdoors. “So I thought, for an indoor drill, to make it more fun, why don’t we make a game, or at least questions, and then it turned into a game because we added a little bit of strategy to it,” Tuczinski said.
And so Fireground was born, or at least the idea for it was. It would take years of research and attention to come up with all of the different cards and questions that make up the game. Every time she thought she’d exhausted a topic, a new angle or a new question would present itself, and Tuczinski would have to go back in and add something.
In the end, she came up with 400 questions at three different difficulty levels, six knot tying tasks and 24 strategy cards. On the one hand, card games have become increasingly popular since Cards Against Humanity debuted in 2011, but on the other hand, there was a very practical reason for keeping the game analogue. “There are still fire companies that don’t have good wifi access to the internet, and they’re stymied sometimes when they even have state courses. If the instructor wants to play a video that they found online about something really super dangerous and dumb to do, it wouldn’t play,” Tuczinski explained.
In that sense, Fireground was born specifically to meet the needs of smaller or more rural fire stations. When asked whether or not that was the intention for the game, Tuczinski explained that that was where she initially saw the most need. “I went to a fire expo to see how it was received and there were mostly volunteers coming through and they were pretty on it. And I could tell that some of the smaller companies were definitely in need of something like this.”
Bring in the Challenge Coins
As is the case for a lot of homemade games, Tuczinski turned to Kickstarter in an attempt to get the project funded. Like so many people before her, she had to come up with tiered rewards for the people who donated to get the project made. “Kickstarter has restrictions, you can’t just buy something and give it. It has to be somewhat customized for you, for your game, for whatever it is that you’re doing.” And challenge coins were perfect for those aims.
Challenge coins have been in firehouses for nearly as long as they’ve been anywhere else. Firefighter challenge coins are as much a part of the culture as sliding down poles and dalmatians. For designing the coin that would serve as one possible reward for the kickstarter campaign, Tuczinski turned to an important saying that fits the Fireground game perfectly. “I liked this motto of ‘Don’t train until you get it right, train until you can’t get it .’” That saying made up the backbone of Tuczinski’s challenge coin design.
The other aspect of the coin that was very important to her was that it have a cutout for a bottle opener. Creating a functional bottle opener is one of our most popular choices for making an interactive challenge coin. “When I saw that you did bottle openers, I thought that it was actually useful and not just the coin itself,” Tuczinski explained. And so, everyone who donated to the Kickstarter at the $75 level or higher, also got their very own coin.
We’ve looked at the ways a challenge coin order can be funded through crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter in the past, but this shows that they also make for a great gift when getting people to fund something else. In particular, they fit perfectly when the thing you’re working to get funded is the perfect training tool for a group of people who work challenge coins into their life regularly.
For more information about Fireground, and to pick up a copy of the game for the firefighters in your life, check out the game’s website.
