Every AWS practice exam I took had the same ending: "Incorrect."
Sometimes there was an explanation. Usually it was a paragraph that told me what the right answer was, not why my design would actually fail. I'd memorise it, pass the question next time, and still not really understand route tables, security groups or NACLs.
So I built the thing I wanted while studying: Tracesleuth, a 3D browser game where you learn AWS by watching your own designs fail.
A packet dropped at the exact hop, with the reason
How it works
Each stage is an exam-style scenario: "Customers can't load the storefront", "The database must only be reachable from the web tier", "This pipeline costs too much".
- Build the design in 3D. The Region is the ground, Availability Zones are islands, the VPC is a glass enclosure, and subnets turn green when they become public.
- Press Send traffic. Packets travel hop by hop through your design.
- Watch it fail, precisely. When a packet is dropped, it stops at the exact hop that dropped it: "main-rtb has no route to 203.0.113.25". Then you get why it failed, the concept behind it, and an exam tip.
- Fix it and send again. Hints get more specific step by step, and a model solution unlocks once you've used them.
The AI, data and architecture worlds use a "solution board" instead of packets. Each requirement is a row, you drop the AWS service that serves it into the slot, and a sample request runs along the row until the service that can't handle it rejects it, with the error the API would return.
What's in the beta
- Six domains: networking, security, core architecture, data engineering, AI and machine learning, and operations.
- Mapped to the exams: SAA-C03, SAP-C02, SOA-C03, DVA-C02, DOP-C02, SCS-C03, DEA-C01, ANS-C01, AIF-C01, MLA-C02 and AIP-C01. Pick an exam and the map shows only the stages its guide covers.
- Free, with no sign-up: the first stage of every domain.
- Desktop browsers only for now.
👉 Play it: beta.tracesleuth.com
A few decisions that might interest you
- No AI grading. A deterministic, unit-tested simulator decides pass or fail. The same design always gets the same verdict, and every failure maps to a hand-written explanation. I didn't want a learning tool that sometimes hallucinates why your security group is wrong.
- No AWS account and no bill. Everything is simulated in the browser, so you can break a NAT gateway as often as you like.
- Every check passes or fails for a stated reason. The explanation quotes your own design: which route table, which rule, which CIDR.
- Privacy. Analytics are cookieless and count stage starts and clears, never anything you type.
What I need from you
I'm a small team, and right now I can't tell whether this is genuinely useful or just pretty. Honest, even harsh, feedback is the most valuable thing you can give me. Try one stage (about 10 to 15 minutes) and tell me:
- Did the failure explanation make it click? Or did you still not get why?
- Was the scenario realistic, compared with the exam or with real work?
- What was confusing, clunky or broken? Screenshots are gold.
- Would you use this alongside practice exams? If not, what's missing?
- Which certification should get the most stages first?
You can reply in the comments, or use the Feedback button in the game. If you'd like to test the full game, join the waitlist on the site. I'll send invite codes to people who leave detailed feedback.
Thanks for reading, and good luck to everyone with an exam coming up. 🙏
