Courtroom Corruption

Eli Vazquez

Published in

Serious Games: 377G

10 min readMar 13, 2020

Justice for Sale

By: Eli Vazquez, Sami Koire, Nylah DePass, Isaac Cinquini

In this game of cards and corruption, lawyers attempt to gain reputation, sway the judge in their favor, and rake in the money. Two players play as lawyers, gathering evidence to build their case and tampering with their opponent’s chance to win the trial. The third player plays as the judge, amassing bribes and special interests before they deliver the final verdict. Whoever makes the most money wins. Will justice be served?

This systems game was created for Stanford’s “Designing Serious Games” class. While the original game mechanics were designed and playtested in our last assignment (see this post for the making of Courtroom Corruption), we had the chance in this assignment cycle to take the game even further.

Revision Goals

Why did we choose Courtroom Corruption as the game to revise for P4? Courtroom Corruption was already a fun and functional game after P3, yet somehow we felt it was incomplete. We could all feel the spark of something great and agreed that it would be a shame to let that spark go out without completing the experience.

As such, one of our main goals with this revision was to make the game as polished and professional looking as possible. The original P3 version had a hand drawn mat, flimsy printer paper cards, and the lids of other board games to obscure each player’s money. For P4, we strove to include much higher quality materials to make the game feel like something you might buy off a shelf.

In addition to polishing our materials, we also wanted to polish the game’s rules. While the game was certainly fun, there were some road bumps we ran into with our final playtest that prevented the game from being a perfectly smooth experience. With our P4 revision, we wanted to make some final adjustments to the rules to make the game a more streamlined experience.

Game Board

In order to make the experience more playable and visually appealing, we completely redesigned the game board. As we were originally designing the general layout of the board, we drew our iterations on a playmat. This allowed us to make rapid changes since it was dry-erase. However, it didn’t convey our theme or make clear the color of each player. Since all the spots to place cards on our drawn board looked similar, it was confusing at times for players to know where to play their cards. The Google Drawing below is a digital representation of the hand-drawn game mat our playtesters used and was created to clarify the rules document, not to be played on.

Our first formal digital iteration of the board, made in Figma to be printed, addressed these concerns and reflects a rule change about bribes that will be discussed in more detail later in this article. The wood and marble textures helped to establish the courtroom setting, but the white background broke from the theme and seemed out of place.

Our final version, which we printed on a foldable 18”x18” game board, added a courtroom background to make the setting feel complete. We also embellished the tables, further color-coded the board, and added flourishes like making the placeholders for the various decks match the card backs of the card types that will sit atop them.

Cards

In addition to the board, we redesigned the cards to make them match the more formal tone and include more iconography that contributes to the theme. The evidence cards look like manila folders that would hold the evidence brought to a real courtroom. We even printed them on beige construction paper to reinforce the theming.

Previous iterations of the cards were printed single-sided on standard printer paper and cut to be put in plastic card sleeves. For the final iteration, we printed the cards and money double-sided on thick construction paper so that they have heft and are standalone.

We also changed the evidence precedence cards to tokens. We hope that this change prevents them from being mixed up with the regular evidence cards, as well as makes their spot on the board clearer since there’s only one location for tokens. The tokens were cut out from poster board, with labels glued to the front and back. This gives them a nice, sturdy feel.

Concealed Money

Since we’re modeling the real world with this game, reputation is public knowledge but wealth is not. However, since all money exchanges aside from bribes are public knowledge, players can expend the mental effort to try to keep track of a ballpark estimate of the net worth of the other players. Since the game is won by having the most money and different players’ strategies may change as a stratification of wealth develops, players have the opportunity to conceal their money.

In our P3 version, we used the lids of other board game boxes to obscure money, but this was an awkward solution. For P4, we replaced these boxes with small wooden briefcases. Not only are these more reasonably sized to fit the money, but they add quite a lot to the theme of the game. When bribing the judge, players actually reach into their briefcases to pull out money and hand it over, adding to the fantasy of being a corrupt lawyer.

This change also made it easier for players to move around between rounds. Since a different player becomes the judge each trial, players need to move around a lot. In our P3 version, it was inconvenient for players to have to scoop up all of their reputation and money when moving. Now, all of a player’s money and reputation is stored in a briefcase, making it easy to transport.

Reputation Tokens

For our P3 version, we had used small, plastic tokens to represent reputation points. Unfortunately, due to complications arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, we were unable to use these same tokens. Due to the short notice, we wound up having to use Bananagram tiles instead. While not ideal, these served as a perfectly suitable replacement.

Game Box

To put everything together, we wanted to have a box we could store the entire game in. Picking a box proved tricky because regular board game boxes we could order on Amazon didn’t come in a size large enough to fit the wooden briefcases. As a result, we wound up making our own box.

The base for the box was made from a 12”x12”x5.5” UPS priority mail box with the flaps on the top removed. This made the box nice and sturdy since it’s made of corrugated cardboard. For the lid, we initially tried making that out of another corrugated cardboard box cut into the proper shape. However, fitting two cardboard boxes together like that proved to be awkward and rough, and the sides had to be held together with tape, which didn’t look great.

We wound up redoing the box lid, this time making it out of poster board. The thinner yet sturdy material made for a more smoother sliding fit. To avoid visible tape, we left flaps on the inside of the box which we used to glue the sides together for a seamless finish.

Lastly, we decorated the box with sticker paper, giving it our own custom front, back, and sides. For the background, we used the same marble texture we used on the board and rules document to evoke the feeling of a courtroom. The front features clipart of a 3-judge panel, emphasizing the 3-player nature of the game. The back features an image of all of our materials to preview what’s inside, as well as a synopsis, play statistics, and materials list.

Rules Sheet

We also updated the rules document for this revision. The original rules document was a 6-page plain word document. This made it difficult to parse for beginning players, as there was a lot to sort through and a lack of visual hierarchy.

For our revision, we shortened the rules to fit onto 2 pages so it could be printed on one double-sided sheet. We added visual hierarchy, dividing up the rules into distinct sections that could be read immediately. Moreover, we added a quick “at a glance” reference guide to the back, detailing the structure of the game with helpful visuals to guide players through the experience. We hope that these changes make picking up the game a much smoother experience for first-time players.

Rule Revisions

In addition to the materials, we also made a number of revisions to the rules to reflect the feedback we received during our final P3 playtest.

One of the biggest complaints we got was the constant back and forth of having players leave during the bribe round. We knew that we wanted players to have private verbal meetings with the judge, so players leaving the room was inevitable. However, playtesters found that bribing each round, a total of 9 times throughout the game, was too much. Moreover, players felt that bribing outside of the final round of each trial was pointless, as all bribes could simply be done in the final round. This let us kill two birds with one stone by limiting bribes to only the final round of each trial. This allows players to have their private meetings with the judge without it becoming a constant pace breaker throughout the trial.

Another issue we noticed is that players felt that reputation was useless during the final trial, since only money mattered when determining the winner. While this shift in value of reputation was an intentional decision as part of our learning goals, we also didn’t want players to perceive this as a design flaw and come away with a negative opinion of the game. Sometimes decisions like this have less to do with balancing the game as they do with managing player perception. To patch this issue, we made it so that each remaining reputation token becomes $1k at the end of the game. This gives reputation some small value to prevent players from seeing it as a design flaw, while still allowing money to be the predominant focus.

Another aspect of the game players were unhappy with was their level of choice in the special interests when they were the judge. Since players only got the option to play one random special interest card or not play one at all, judges felt limited in their ability to play strategically. While we wanted a certain level of limitation to force difficult choices, we also realized that players need a certain level of choice to be able to come up with their own strategies. We also took note that our previous set up, where players would have to draw one card each from the special interest and no special interest decks was a bit overcomplicated. This made the game more difficult to learn and took up a lot of space on the board. As a result, we combined the special interest and no special interest decks and then simply had the judge draw 2 cards from this combined deck and pick 1 to play. This meant that judges would sometimes have 2 different special interests to choose between instead of always having only 1 to consider. This does also mean that the judge could draw 2 no special interest cards, which is a possibility players will have to plan around.

Finally, players were confused by the public opinion tracker in the middle of the board. This was meant to be a handy way to keep track of the value of each player’s evidence, but players were confused and thought that it might have some greater meaning than it actually did. Having to retabulate the public opinion points after tampering with evidence made players feel that tracking the points throughout the trial was pointless. In the end, we decided to remove this feature and simply have the players count up the evidence values by themselves.

Playtest

We performed a videotaped playtest with 3 of one of our team member's roommates. You can watch the playtest here:

Playtest

Conclusion

With this final revision, we hoped to make the game more professional, easy to pick up, and fun to play. If you want to try it for yourself, checkout the printable version below.