“Construction & Corruption” is a negotiation and worker-placement game situated in Montreal, Canada. It pokes fun at our perennial problems, while letting 3 – 7 players engage in some light-hearted bribery and extortion.
Each player is a Construction boss, responsible for a Construction contract on each turn. If you do not finish your contract, you keep it, and get paid again the turn after.
The incentive is to keep your work unfinished as long as possible. Bosses can send their workers to opposing players’ sites, and finish their work instead. Thus the dynamic of the game is ‘screw your neighbour,’ with the added element that players’ cash totals are secret. Each turn also holds an election for mayor, who can punish their opponents, and reward supporters.
After seven turns, the game is complete, whoever has the most money wins.
The game is bilingual – click to read them in English or in French.
GAME OVERVIEW
The game has 7 turns, named for the last 7 Montreal city elections, 1994 up to 2017.
Each turn has 4 required phases, and one conditional phase. Phases have no turn order; a timer may be used to end them. These phases are: Construction, Corruption, Election, Investigation (conditional), & Extraction.
CONSTRUCTION PHASE
1. Each player receives a round construction contract. They place it on the board, with one of their workers and a traffic pylon.
placing
2. Before doing any work, they are paid $100,000 for each contract they possess. Each contract also accumulates a corruption token.
CORRUPTION PHASE
1. Players place their remaining workers on their own contracts, or the contracts of their opponents. A total of 3 workers will complete a zone at the end of the turn.
2. There is no player order. Players are free to place their workers, accept a bribe, and then place them somewhere else. They can do this repeatedly; no placements, promises or bribes are binding.
3. Once the players have had enough, they move onto the Election phase. They can no longer move their workers for the rest of the turn.
ELECTION PHASE
1. Players choose one among them to be Mayor. They simultaneously reveal their votes. Debate and bribery are encouraged. Yes, you can vote for yourself.
2. If a player receives a plurality of votes, they become Mayor, receive a ‘Key to the City’ and gain two powers for the rest of the turn:
A) City workers. They can be added to the total # workers on contracts – possibly finishing zones at the end of the turn.
B) Festivals. When placed on a contract zone, the festival guarantees that no work is completed, no matter how many workers.
3. If there is a tie, then no player is mayor. There is no festival or city workers. Instead, this failure to rig the vote results in the conditional phase:
INVESTIGATION (conditional phase)
1. Players have a chance to incriminate and implicate each other, adding corruption tokens to their contracts with Investigation cards.
2. For each corruption token, players must roll Montreal dice. On the result of a Montreal logo, they return money to the city.
EXTRACTION PHASE
1. Players now count the total workers on their contracts, including city workers and festivals. 3 total is complete!
2. For each completed contract – (three workers, no festival) – its owner receives an investigation card. The contract is returned to the city, and its accumulated corruption is wiped clean.
3. Excluding the one minimum worker per contract, all remaining workers are returned to their owners. City workers and Festivals are returned to the city.
END OF TURN
That cycle repeats for the 7 turns of the game. The player with the most money at the end of the game wins.
ABOUT THE GAME CREATOR
One day we told a joke about making a game with the issues in Montreal, and then slowly day by day, it became real. For a year and a half now, myself – David Loach (second on the right) in collaboration with many authors, artists, assistants and testers, gradually developed a party game that lets everyone laugh about Construction, Corruption and local politics – a sore spot in Montreal and across the world.
