Embrace the dark side of sport with Corrupt Cup Contest

Sport has a corruption problem, but rather than handwaving it away by focusing only on the good bits, Corrupt Cup Contest chooses to embrace this shady side of organised competition. It's a strategy game where you pick a country then attempt to snaffle as many sports tournaments as possible. You do this by gaining favour from the voting countries, something that tends to—but doesn't necessarily—involve a spot of money changing hands.

"How you accrue that favour is up to you!" says developer Lukas Roper of Good Sport Games, in the press release. "You can play honestly by convincing delegates with fine dining, PR campaigns and even having delegates visit your country, or you accrue the same interest much more cheaply by being corrupt and directly bribing delegates with mansions, watches or a lovely holiday home! The game asks you to strategize your management of a limited campaign budget and manage your 'heat' to ensure the media don’t take too much of an interest in any potential dodgy doings."

Campaigns will "randomly change" each time you play to keep things fresh, and there's also 8-player online multiplayer, with the potential to form alliances with/utterly betray your chums. "While managing all this," says Roper, "you’ll have to manage other players who want to trip you up! If you see a player running ahead, why not accuse them of something dodgy and see whether the media will bite? Or start forming unofficial alliances between you and other nations, and strategize to take another player together? Of course your 'friends' could at any point jump ship, betray you, or have been misinforming you all along!"

Corrupt Cup Contest is coming to Early Access sometime in April, May or June, and it's on Steam Greenlight if you'd like to do some voting.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.