The Corporate Ladder

The Corporate Ladder is a party card game for 4 to 20 players about ambition, misinformation and deniable edits.

Every player takes a rank at Ascend Corp, from CEO down to Associate. Each quarter the Board issues four random words, and the CEO has fifteen words or fewer to write a memo using all of them. The memo then travels down the chain of command. Each rank is shown fewer of the Board’s four words than the rank above it, and every employee below the CEO may change up to two things — a word added, deleted or swapped, or a mark of punctuation. Editing is optional and invisible: a player may retype the memo exactly, and nobody can tell whether they did.

The lowest rank reads the result aloud. The memo passes if three of the four Board words survived. If it fails, the CEO pays a $1,500 mismanagement fine and is demoted to Associate, and everyone below moves up one rank. Salary is paid every quarter regardless of the outcome. Players also hold a hidden Secret Identity with its own quarterly objective, and a hand of Attribute cards — Skills, Perks and HR Violations — played during a five-minute meeting phase. A Breaking News event closes each quarter.

Four quarters make a fiscal year. The highest personal net worth after year-end bonuses is named Chairman of the Board. The game includes two further modes using the same deck: The Small Merger (6–8 players), played for position rather than money, in which two employees arrived with an acquisition and are hidden in the org chart; and The Merger (9–20 players), which splits the table into two rooms that cannot hear each other, scored against a hidden answer key the CEO files before the clock starts. A free companion web application runs the memo and the timing at the table.

—description from the designer