Players: 3-7
Time: 30-45 minutes
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)
The Components
Corruption comes with 112 cards & rules in a tuckbox.
The Cards: The cards are all produced on medium-weight, glossy card stock, printed full color. There are 70 player cards, 24 contract cards, 3 government cards, and 14 phone cards. All of the cards feature nice Art Noveau borders which help set the time period.
The 3 government cards list three different government agencies currently funding projects, "City Hall", "The County Seat", and "The Capitol". They just feature the text and are very plain.
The 24 contract cards each list a contract (e.g., "Water Utility") and a value (e.g., "$600,000") and show a simple colored line drawing in-between. The line art is a little plain, but attractive. I wish the value of each card had been a bit bigger, to make it easier to read from across the table.
The 70 player cads include 10 standard cards for each of the 7 player colors. Each set includes 6 bribe cards of various values and 4 character cards. The character cards unfortunately don't include any reminder on what they do, but they're pretty intuitive after a couple of games. Cleverly, each of the bribe cards has two different values, one horizontal and one vertical, to reflect how the card is used (cards played to the "Swiss Bank Accounts" are played sideways and have half value); this helpful addition made them very easy to use. Each of these cards shows a colored line drawing as well, matching the contract cards for style.
The 14 phone cards are only used for an advanced game variant. Each simply says "little black book" and has a picture of someone making a phone call. They're a bit plain.
Rulebooks: A double-sided rule sheet. It's well-written and has a lot of good, illustrative examples (though figure 4 has an incorrect example under the "airport"; if you look closely you'll see it was a tie, which means that no one should have been awarded the contract).
Box: The box is a double-card tuck box, which I'm never that fond of. This one has given me particular problems because it's just barely big enough for the cards, and so if you don't arrange your two piles of cards precisely right the box doesn't fit correctly.
On the whole, the components of Corruption are pretty average. The cardstock is sufficiently sturdy, but the art isn't that notable, and the cards could have been easier to use with larger values on all the contracts. I've thus given the Style of Corruption an average "3" out of "5"
The Game Play
The object of Corruption is to make the most money off of government contracts through bribery.
Setup: Each player takes a set of cards which includes: bribes for $1000, $2000, $4000, $6000, $8000, and $10000; two reporters; one district attorney; and one hitman.
The three government agencies--The Capitol, City Hall, and The County Seat--are placed in the middle of the table, and two government contracts are placed under each. Each government contract has a name (e.g., "High School"), and a value from $100,000 to $1,200,000.
A first player is selected and the first round of play begins.
Playing A Round: In a round of play, each player plays one card at a time to either an individual contract or to the Swiss Bank Account of a governmental agency (who controls two or more contacts). The first 1-4 cards each player plays are face-up, depending on which round of play you're in. (It's equal to the round number, from 1-4.)
Characters or bribes can be played under contracts.
Only bribes can be played into Swiss bank Accounts. They're always face-down, and they have half their normal value, which is denoted by the card being played sideways.
Scoring A Round: After each player has played 6 cards, all of the cards are flipped face-up, and then the contracts are each awarded to the player who paid the most bribes for that contract. Here's the exact sequence of scoring:
Allot Swiss Bank Account Bribes. First all Swiss Bank Account bribes are distributed to individual contracts. As with all scoring resolution this is done in the order the bribes were placed. Each player in turn takes his bribe (or bribes) and puts them under one of the individual contracts controlled by that agency.
Resolve Hit Man. Now each hit man played may kill another character on the same contract as him, removing it. As with all resolution, this is done from first played until last, meaning that one hit man could hit another if so desired & if he was played first.
Resolve DAs. Any contract with a DA on it is now automatically cancelled: no one wins.
Resolve Reporters. Finally, reporters are resolved. Each reporter removes one bribe from the same contract they're on.
Allocate Contracts. Finally, each contract is awarded to the player with the most bribes on it. If there was a tie, no one wins the contract.
Ending a Round of Play: After a round of play, a player gets all of his bribes back, but not any characters he played. Any contracts that weren't awarded stay out and two new contracts are added to each governmental agency (yes, this does mean that an agency may have more than two contracts in a later round of play, something that's not clear from the rules.)
Ending the Game: The game ends after four rounds of play. The player with the most value of government contracts at that point is the winner.
Notes on Playing the Game: It may not be immediately obvious from the above how the game plays, and how much subtlety is required. In any round of play you want to try and got as many of your bribes out as you want, but at the same time you have to measure how your characters could make a big difference. Most of the cards being blind (face-down) means that there's a lot of guessing and second-guessing.
if you play badly you'll find, at the end of a ruond that you bid just a little too little on everything, and that you wasted your cards for no effect. If you played well you'll have barely edged your opponents out for multiple wins, at the same time having used minimal cards where you didn't win, and maybe even will have screwed up a major opponent win with good use of a DA.
Relationships to Other Games
Bruno Faidutti lists two inspirations for this game, Banana Republic (1993) and Stud Poker. Banana Republic (by Doris & Frank) does indeed share some mechanics with Corruption (1999) since both involve adding bribes & special characters to win specific reward cards (here contracts, there voters). The correlation with Stud Poker seems a bit weaker.
At heart Corruption is a game of blind bidding and bluffing. It reminds me the most of another Bruno Faidutti game, Citadels, since they both involve bluffing and second-guessing your opponents. I'm actually quite surprised that Corruption hasn't been the huge hit that Citadels was, since they're both quite clever games that fit into the same general niche of design.
Finally, it's worth nothing that Corruption does have some simultaneous action design elements, in the way that the characters interact.
The Game Design
Corruption is generally a good game. It's fast and simple, but it also has some real strategic depth, as you try and plan out a turn's worth of bribes through consecutive plays..
The best element of the game is that the bluffing works very well. You can purposefully put some cards face-up, to ward away opponents. Alternatively you can hide your highest cards face-down to try and trick opponents into undercomitting, or even put them up in the Swiss Bank Account to try and give yourself flexibility when scoring comes around. The characters add a whole other level to the bluffing, as you can try and guess what your opponents are doing, then put down the correct character to counteract them.
My only complaint for the game is a minor one. This is a game with a minor level of fragility, where a single bad bidder can throw things off, particularly if he makes unusual use of his character cards. Fortunately, each character card can only be used once.
On the whole I think Corruption is a great game. I give it a high "4" out of "5" for Substance. I have some questions about how deep of strategy is allowed, and how that will influence replayability, but if I find that gameplay matures through numerous additional plays I could easily see that rating climbing to a full "5".
Conclusion
Corruption is a superb game of bluffing and blind bidding. If you like these elements at all you should rush out to pick up this game. In some ways it strikes me as the predecessor to Citadels; it's unique in and of itself, but it requires some of the same hard decisions as you're second-guessing your opponents. I think it's a shame that this little gem hasn't received the same attention that its more recently published brethren has.
