The reason I find Intrigue so interesting is that it really forces you to screw people, and - more critically - to be nasty about it. In a game like Diplomacy, being an out-and-out sleazeball, rampantly backstabbing your nieghbors, is not recommended. In fact, honesty and studied ambiguity is usually the best policy in that game. In Intrigue though, being two-faced is the route to victory.
You have to screw people most of the time on your turn (more or less). Everybody knows this. However, the person who does well is going to be the one who solicits the largest *total* of bribes, and so will be the one with the used car salesman skills: the one who can manage to convince everyone at the table that he or she actually has a good chance to get the job and is not going to be the one to get screwed, even though everyone knows they probably will be. You need to be evenhanded (playing favorites is a recipie for a loss) and yet unpredictable (always just taking the high bribe means that early players won't bid in future, meaning a smaller total take for you). The game goes out of its way to punish integrity. You need to both convince people that the job is theirs for the right bribe, then be willing to pocket the money and give the job to someone else, sometimes even someone who paid less. Never has a game been so well set up to reward both betraying people, and going out of your way to make it personally painful.
Obviously, this is not a game for everyone. It has sort of a car-crash fascination for me personally (in addition to an admiration for the wickedness of the design). But there are certainly people who will be repelled by the whole enterprise.
Chris
http://homepage.mac.com/c_farrell/iblog
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