LogFAQs > #934190006

37. Power Grid (2004)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Economic, route-building, bidding
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 6
Game length: 90-150 minutes
Experience: 3 plays (2015, 2016, 2019) with 5-6 players: Germany, China, India
Previous ranks: 35/100 (2016), 34/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player runs an energy company, delivering power to multiple cities, with a goal of maximizing the number of cities which you can supply with power. Each round of the game is split into three phases: auctions for power plant technology (which determines which resources are required to power the cities and how many cities you can power), expanding the power network (which is more expensive depending on the route it takes relative to your own network), buying resources (which become more expensive as they grow scarcer), and finally, consuming those resources to power your cities and gain money.

Design - There are two inaccessible elements to Power Grid. First is the arithmetic. Unfortunately, there's no way around it: you'll spend yourself down to your last few dollars in Power Grid fairly often, and with a bidding mechanism as free as Power Grid's is, that will often be a good business decision to math it out. Secondly, it is fiddly. It literally has a phase known as the "bureaucracy" phase where resource replenishment happens, and there are special rules about how to refill the power plants for offer, and special rules again for "Step 2" and "Step 3."

It's all in the service of a good game. The three main decision-making phases to Power Grid play extremely differently, but all three of them are centered around good ol' cash. (Power Grid's rubber-band effect essentially also is centered around being an economic discount; getting later pickings mainly just means paying a premium for what you wnat/need.)

The first two phases individually are also fun even in isolation: Auctions are pretty much fun by default. An individual auction in Power Grid is quite vanilla, but the way the cascading auctions matters is really interesting: you can buy a maximum of one power plant and each player gets a chance to get a power plant. Together, that means if you buy the first offer, then the remaining players will each get to contend with fewer opponents. Going first in the turn order is arguably the most punishing here, as you may get stuck having to pass if you dislike the initial offer, and you're guaranteed to get locked out of good plant bids later if you can't persuade someone else to buy your first offer.

Then there's building networks. I love the way the board grows in pretty much any route-building game. It has this great visual appeal. As space becomes more contentious, expansion becomes more difficult/costly. I like that unlike in Catan, you can't be completely boxed in (though you can be de facto boxed, when it's too expensive to go anywhere - but even this is temporary). While it's not as dramatic as blowing an army off the map, it can be fun to surprise someone by occuping a city close to them by going through their city. Building multiple routes in a single turn is very satisfying and feels like a worthy reward for generating or saving all that money.

People complain about and laud Power Grid's rubber-band mechanism, which is based on how many cities you have already entered. I think it's generally clever, even if it overcorrects by a bit - it tends to keep people holding a similar number of cities. You might be tempted to turtle and keep the best turn order for a while, and there are times when this is a valid strategy... but being an economic game, your revenues will grow more when you power more cities, and the whole point of keeping to a few cities would be to consolidate wealth... so you can expand. My skill level isn't high, but the incentives seem fair to me.

Experience - Perhaps key to my enjoyment and admiration of Power Grid (and also the reason I've played it so few times): I've never had to handle bureaucracy myself. Understanding it doesn't seem to be key to enjoying the game, which further has me wary of its fiddliness. Anyway, despite that multiple friends own it, and that I quite admire it, I've only played it three times, and a different version each time. I haven't performed particularly well, but Power Grid's blend of significant interaction (on the map and in auctions and competing for resources and map-space) and solitary puzzle (how should I value this plant, and when/where should I expand?) has made it satisfying each time.

Future - Power Grid is a tough one to get to the table, precisely because of its daunting bureaucracy and fiddlier rules. (Each special version of it also has special rules, like China's command economy.) Given that PG also can't handle two players, it's a tough sell to enter my collection. But I am optimistic and would like to get it to the table this year.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness