cucumber re-run failed scenarios automatically with a tag?
I've been considering writing something like what you're describing, but I found this:
If you're tired of having to re-kick builds in your CI server because of non deterministic failures, this post is for you.
In a nutshell: he makes a new rake task called cucumber:rerun that uses rerun.txt to retry failed tests. It should be pretty easy to add some looping in there to retry at most 3x (for example).