Welcome to Sysifus Corp is Wonmin Lee's mildly satirical back-stabbing race game built around the dog-eat-dog world of office politics.
With WFH (working from home) having become the norm for many previously office-based workers, some of us may be looking back at office life fondly through the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia. Others tho' will recognise the cut-throat environment of petty office politics reflected in this tongue-in-cheek race game, where 2-4 players will be racing to move their office worker meeples to each of the three Boss locations and then back to the start position. This means travelling to each of the four corners of the board. In thematic terms, you're competing for promotion by being the first to get a performance review after having satisfied all three Bosses.
Players start with a hand of two 'Project' cards and three 'Office Politics' cards. On your turn you have three workhour tokens to spend on three actions. You can Place a Project card on the board. The card can be placed in any orientation but, to subsequently move to it, you'll need its post-it notes to match up with the tile you're moving from. You can Move your meeple onto a neighbouring Project card where there are connecting post-it notes, or, if you still have a memo token, you can use that to create a connection. Some of the Project cards give you 'Company Influence' when you move to that card. This Influence is the currency of the game, used to activate Office Politics cards. Finally, you can Research to draw additional Office Politics cards. We found that we rarely used the Research option because players always draw back up to three Office Politics cards and two Project cards at the end of their turn. Just sometimes, however, it proved a worthwhile gamble to use the Research action to discard and replace your hand, in the hope of picking up a card that you could profitably use to advance your meeple or screw over an opponent.
It's the Office Politics cards that are the meat of Sysifus Corp because they can be played for a special effect, including to manipulate the Project cards already laid. For example, you can rotate a card so that an opponent cannot readily follow the path you've taken. Office Politics cards can be played in addition to the workhour actions but they usually have to be paid for by spending Influence points. An additional or more powerful action can be taken by spending more Influence and/or discarding other Office Politics cards.
Welcome to Sysifus Corp is, in effect, a hand management puzzle game with a 'take that' element - tho' you're not so much attacking other players as making the office race more difficult for them. It offers plenty of scope for variation between games because it comes with 100 Office Politics cards (4 each of 25 different cards) but you only use 40 in any single game (ie: 4 each of 10 different cards). That means it's possible to play consecutive games using completely different Office Politics cards! Plenty then to explore as you build your strategy for getting one over on your office rivals.
Welcome to Sysifus Corp is published by Pegasus Games. You can order it direct from the publishers at www.sysifuscorp.com. And Pegasus have sent Board's Eye View a handful of discount codes that give a 20% discount. If you want one, just message us via the Board's Eye View Facebook page and we'll send you a code if we still have any left.