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Corrosion, the debut game from designer Stefan Bauer, is set in a vaguely steampunky factory in which 1-4 players compete to build machines. It’s mixture of worker placement and engine building, except Corrosion isn’t just an engine builder, it’s also an engine destroyer. As the name suggests, everything you build is slowly corroding, so make the most of it while you can.
I Know What It Means To Work Hard On Machines
On your turn of Corrosion, you perform one of two main actions – send a worker into the factory or turn the wheel in the centre of your player board – plus any number of maintenance actions, which usually involve either trading in gears to activate a machine or spending steam from your boiler to refresh items and move machines or workers around the factory.
Workers (or engineers as they’re called) are cards each with a number value of 1-4+ and a colour suit (green, orange, blue, grey, or wild). Each player starts with a small hand of these, a player board (aka your factory) and a few temporary victory points (more on these later).
Your factory is divided into four sectors and the worker card number relates to the sector you will play them into. The lower the number, the faster they’ll return to your hand when you turn the wheel. Worker actions allow you to reserve a machine from the market, build up the steam in your boiler, gain gears (from three available types – small, medium and chrome) or hire qualified engineers. Each player begins with the same actions available, but assigned to different numbered/coloured cards to the other players.
What makes the suits important is that when someone plays an engineer, everyone else at the table can copy that action on the same turn, provided they play an engineer of the same colour suit but a higher number. The advantage of this is being able to act on others’ turns as well as your own. The disadvantage is losing your worker and their ability until they return to your hand. Hiring qualified engineers is the only way to get those 4 or 4+ cards, but be warned! They will cost you one of your temporary victory point tokens – so make sure they’re going to earn you more points in the long run than you spend to hire them.
There are three types of machines available in Corrosion: turning machines, which are ready as soon as you take them and operate every time you rotate the wheel on your player board to give you a small bonus; one-shot machines, which cost gears to activate and give you a significant one-time bonus once they hit sector 4 (including awards tokens – which give you points for achieving certain goals); and chrome machines, which also cost gears to activate and give you an ongoing power, plus victory points at the end of the game. The machines on the right-hand side of the market also come with a juicy bonus as points tokens keep being added to them throughout.
Chrome machines won’t expire; however you can only have one of each type (there are three types) at any moment (plus one inactive machine of any type kept at the side of your board). As soon as you cover one up with a new machine, you lose its benefit. However, it’s in your best interest to keep replacing chrome machines, because each one you activated during the game will earn you points at the end.
Big Wheels Keep On Turning
So what’s this wheel I keep mentioning? Well, this is the mechanic that keeps your factory turning over. Whenever the dial marked with 4 (Also called Sector X which is a bit confusing) moves to a section, all of the turning machines are going to corrode away, any unspent small and medium gears will be lost, one-shot machines will activate and expire, and workers will come back to your hand.
You can also manipulate when things hit sector X during the two maintenance phases you get a turn. By expending steam from the top to the bottom of your boiler (steam is a limited resource, with three tokens per player – although you can sometimes get an extra token with certain bonuses), you can move workers and machines to another sector of the board, expediating their arrival in sector X. But in order to keep doing this, you’ll need to keep sending in workers who can produce the steam for you.
A Fun Factory
I really enjoy Corrosion. There’s a nice blend of theme and mechanics here – the gears are nice chunky tactile pieces (although if you’re into pimping out your games you could even buy some real ones from a hardware store to replace them) and the central turning wheel is a lot of fun to operate.
There’s a smart efficiency puzzle at work the whole time – do you go for using all your workers or for rushing the engine round to bring them home? Do you spend that three point worker you were saving to capitalise on the action your rival just played? Is it better to go for the quick thrills of a one-time machine that’ll give you a handy bonus, or to save your gears for a pricey chrome one with juicy victory points?
My friend who nearly always wins worker placement and engine building games because of his ability to do the maths for several turns ahead said trying to decide the best strategy for this was ‘breaking his brain’ – which for me was a great thing: finally I had a chance to not get trounced! The solo mode is challenging, too. I recently scored my best ever total of 58 points, which is merely ‘satisfactory’ according to the rule book and its 100+ point ultimate goal.
It's No Big Deal...
However, there are some issues you might run into. The rules are not complex but there are a lot of them. I’d recommend starting with a solo or two-player game as with three or four new players turns might take too long whilst you get used to what to do.
In addition to this, the iconography can take a bit of getting used to - for example, the icons for getting a new steam token, generating steam and expending steam are all quite similar, whilst the small and medium gears are too similar in shape and colour so it’s easy to get them confused.
We also got a big rule wrong on our first play – whenever you take a chrome machine, you add a point token incentive to the machine furthest right in the market. We weren’t adding them often enough, making the game take longer (the victory point tokens running out is the main timer). My other small gripe is the awards system. These can give some nice bonus points if you meet certain objectives, but they’re only available on a few one-shot machines and I’ve played solo and two-player games where none of these machines even entered the market.
These are small issues, however. This is very impressive for a debut design, and I don’t have anything else quite like it in my collection. Now if you’ll excuse me, I better get back to work – I’ve got a long way to go to hit that 100 point solo challenge.
