In our build there are certain scenarios that fail for reasons which are out of our control or take too long to debug properly. Things such asynchronous javascript etc.
I've been considering writing something like what you're describing, but I found this:
http://web.archive.org/web/20160713013212/http://blog.crowdint.com/2011/08/22/auto-retry-failed-cucumber-tests.html
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).