Board Games
Power Grid! | My Favorite Eurogames #4
“Bid, network, and manage resources in a race to supply the most cities with power.”
Designed by Friedemann Friese, art by Domonkos Bence.
A game for 2–6 players, run time 120 minutes, for ages 12+.
Power Grid is perhaps my favorite “old school board game”. And by “Old School”, I mean games from the start of the Euro explosion until about 2005. I first played Power Grid before I was into hobby board games. I found it too complicated at the time and didn’t think much of it.
Fast forward many years later and I can fully appreciate this game for what it is. It currently sits at #50 in the BGG Top 100 and will, sadly, continue its descent down the list, as so many older games have done before it. It’s only a matter of weeks until Cascadia or On Mars knocks it from the Top 50. What better time than now to share my love for this game?
Theme
Players compete to power the major cities of a given country with an electrical network — a power grid — by bidding for power plants, speculating on fuel resources, and deciding when and where to build on a big map. Who can supply the most cities with power infrastructure and power them?!
The resources consist of money and — in my opinion — turn order. More on that later. Money can get you power plants and raw resources like oil, coal, garbage, and uranium. Turn order gives you priority to speculate on resources in the open market, to build first on the national map, and to have the last say in the auction for power plants.
The theme is light — as many Euros tend to be — but it fits well. I have a dozen different maps for the game and it’s always fun to play on a different one that has different nuances with its regions and special rules.
Game Mechanics
Let’s check out Power Grid’s many game mechanisms!
Auction/Bidding
Players will bid in 1 “electro” (money) increments to buy power plants. These power plants can, in turn, power a designated number of cities with electricity and have a fuel cost to do so. For example, a power plant might be able to power up to 3 cities for 2 coal or 4 cities for some amount of uranium.
Catch the Leader
Power Grid has great catch-up mechanics. It’s very hard for one player to get too far out in front, which leads to consistently tight games that come down to the wire. Player order — which is extremely important in this game — is determined by the number of cities one has built in. The fewer cities you’ve built out on the board, the better your position is in the turn order. Ties are broken by comparing the strength of the Power Plant with the weakest (cheapest list cost) getting priority.
In Power Grid, the “first player” gets to bid last on Power Plants, speculate on resources first, and build first during the round.
Income
Players collect income at the end of every round based on the number of cities they are currently “powering”. That means the number of cities the player has built in and has spent resources toward this round. Sometimes you can power more cities than you have built in, sometimes you can’t power all the cities you’ve built in, and sometimes you choose to power fewer cities than you could.
Market Speculation
Players can choose to buy as much of a commodity like oil or coal as they can store in their power plants. The price of fuel fluctuates from round to round. Players can also invest in distant cities at a cost if they want to reach them before their competitors. Sometimes, cutting off a key city makes it impossible for the player behind you to expand or makes it painfully expensive to do so.
Network/Route Building
Like many Euro games — especially railroad games — Power Grid plays out on a board shaped like a national map of countries like Germany, the U.S., and, well, pretty much the majority of the major countries you can think of! There are a ton of maps. Players link up their “grids” but can pay a fee to build further out if they deem it desirable to do so.
What I like about Power Grid
- Every turn presents interesting decision points.
- There are many avenues to success in Power Grid.
- It feels tight and tense all the way to the last round.
- It feels rewarding to make a good purchase in the Power Plant auction or to lock your opponent out of a resource they need.
- It feels like it’s well-balanced and interesting at all player counts.
- It has high replayability because it’s loads of fun and there are tons of maps.
What You Might Not Like about Power Grid
- Some players find it takes too much number-crunching, which leads to lots of Analysis Paralysis.
- The base game + the maps can be expensive.
- Can be fiddly with resource denomination exchanging and constant income and purchasing.
- Set-up and take-down can take some time.
- Players can inadvertently throw the game in a number of ways that are not obvious to many.
- Turn order is a tactical battle that can change unexpectedly and is much more important than in any other game I can think of!
- It’s a medium-weight game, but the Power Plant auction is unintuitive at first.
- It’s possible that the best player doesn’t always win, leading to tension that doesn’t exist in games of perfect information.
If you love Power Grid, I ask you to rate it on BGG so it may live in the TOP 100 for others to more easily discover it for many years to come. Here is the link. Do it! Do it! = )
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