From the Game's Introduction:
Premise
Courts & Corsets seeks to reproduce the intrigue involved in such films as Amadeus and Dangerous Liasons. The goal of the players is to collectively tell a tragic and melodramatic story.
Bidding
The rules of Courts & Corsets rely entirely on a bidding process, by which players are able to influence play with an ever-dwindling resource. In this game, the tokens used for bidding are called Crowns no matter what physical piece is actually used during play. You may use any type of tokens to bid with, provided all players possess the ability to hide their tokens during a bid.
When a bid is called for, the bidding players must secretly select a number of Crowns from their available cache. Once all bidding players have done so, all must fairly display their amount. The highest bidder is considered the winner, and all Crowns bid by winner and losers are discarded (and are unavailable to the players until their caches are legally replenished). Ties are broken by the winning players conducting a second bid, or however many more bids are required to achieve a single winner.
If a situation arises where levels of triumph are needed, the player with the highest bid obtains the best goal, descending bids until the lowest bid achieves the worst result. Ties during these bids are resolved as aforementioned.