Deep Print Games and Capstone Games Welcome Corrosion

German publisher Deep Print Games launched in 2020 with Renature, a domino tile-laying game from Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling that I previewed here, and to date it's released games of about the same level of difficulty — Kyoto and Juicy Fruits (covered here).

Now Deep Print Games has announced its most involved game to date: Corrosion from newcomer Stefan Bauer, with this being a 1-4 player game that takes 60-120 minutes to play. Pegasus Spiele will co-publish English and German versions of the game for release in Europe in November 2021, while Capstone Games will oversee release of the English version in the U.S. and elsewhere that same month.

Here's an overview of the game:

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In Corrosion, each of you manages a factory and deploys engineers to build up diversified scoring and production engines. In the steam-filled air, however, your biggest enemy is time because most machines and gears rust away quickly, so you are well advised to also produce chrome gears and invest in rustproof and powerful chrome machines.

On your turn, you can either play an engineer card or turn the corrosion wheel of your factory:

—Playing engineers mostly gains you new machines and qualified engineers. Other players can copy your engineer's action by playing an engineer of the same suit but a higher grade.
—Turning your corrosion wheel puts your machines to work and returns engineers to your hand, but also causes old gears and machines to rust.

To be successful, you must cleverly co-ordinate your engineers and corrosion wheel and smoothly shift from one efficient engine to the next.

The game end is triggered once the special point supply or the award supply run out. Then, whoever was able to score the most points with their machines and awards wins.

You can read the English and German rules from the BGG game page, but to add a bit more detail, the corrosion wheel is a cardboard disc that rotates on your factory board and is divided into quadrants 1, 2, 3, and X.

After you play an engineer, you place it in the quadrant that corresponds to the number on the card, with a 4 being placed face down on the X space. Everything in the X section (other than face-down cards) is removed at the start and end of your turn during maintenance, so when you turn the wheel, you return any engineers in quadrant 1 to your hand, akin to gaining action cubes in Stefan Feld's Macao. Turning engines — which provide a constant small benefit with each turn of the wheel — and one-shot machines — which provide a larger effect but only once — are removed from play when in the X quadrant, having rusted away.

Chrome engines sit on your personal player board away from the corrosion wheel, so they won't rust, but they come in three types, and you can have only one of each type active on your player board, so you lose powers as you acquire new chrome machines and add them to your board, but you'll still score points for all of these machines at the end of the game.

One of the currencies in the game is steam, with you moving water tokens to the top of your boiler to generate steam and to the bottom of your boiler to consume steam, thus you must manage the flow of water in your system, along with your supply of gears, some of which will rust away while chrome gears will stick around until used.

Corrosion includes two types of point tokens, one of which can be spent to fuel actions on various machines and another that serves as one of the clocks of the game, along with the special awards that you can claim, which grant points based on how well you meet their conditions.