Power Grid: A day late, a dollar short
“Damnit, I’m a dollar short!!”
This sentence basically sums up the awesome game of Power Grid. I hadn’t played this game in a long while (and it actually is one of the first games I owned), but recent back-to-back games of it reminded me of how much fun and strategic this game is, especially when you play with 6 players. It’s not super hard to learn the rules of the game, but it all comes down to balancing your resources, utilizing turn order, and making sure you don’t run out of money.
The goal of Power Grid is to build and power the most cities. The base game comes with a double-sided board that shows either the U.S. or Germany, but there are expansions available of maps of other countries and variations to game play. There are 3 phases for the whole game, and there are 4 parts to each round. They 4 parts are:
- Purchasing power plants.
- Buying resources.
- Building cities.
- Bureaucracy (aka getting paid for powering your cities).
Truthfully, I love the part of the game where players purchase power plants. The process is done through bidding … and that is where things can seriously escalate and get hilariously funny when people start playing chicken or being dicks to each other. There’s a lot of posturing and trying to decipher if the next player will outbid you or fall for the trap you so your opponent grossly overpays for said power plant.
In Phase 1 and 2, eight power plants are laid out face up. The first four in ascending order are available to purchase, while the next four are what can potentially come into play for purchasing. Players in turn order from left to right can choose to big on a power plant. On each power-plant card, you can see what resources it needs and how many cities it can power. The number on the top of the card means it’s the minimum bid a player can start with. In Phase 3, there are six power plants that are laid out, and they are all available.
When a plant is being bid on, players in clockwise can decide if they want to outbid the previous player or pass. Whoever wins the bid gets the power plant. If the player who started the bidding bows out, he is out for the entire round. If another player bows out of bidding, he can still enter the round when his turn comes up. When any player wins a power plant, he cannot buy any more plants for that round. When a power plant goes to a player, a new power plant is immediately drawn from the deck and rearranged among the other face-up cards in numerical order, which may move up a plant that wasn’t available earlier to be now available. Also, in each phase, certain power plants are removed so that the power-plant market is constantly changing.
The next part is buying resources. This is done in reverse turn order. The resource market is filled according to the chart, and the more scarce an item is, the more expensive it becomes. Thus, turn order is very important and the first player to buy resources purchases them at a discount. If you’re the first player to bid on a power plant, you’ll be the last to purchase resources. You’re not allowed to purchase resources that you can’t put into one of your power plants, and each power plant can only hold double the resource capacity it says on the card.
Next up is building cities, which is also done in right to left turn order. Each city has 3 spots that cost $10, $15 or $20 to build in it. The $10 spots are only available in Phase 1, the $15 in Phase 2, and $20 in Phase 3. When you build cities, you pay the city cost as well as the connecting prices to get to the next city, which is shown on the map. It’s wise to get a good look at the map and where your opponents are building, because then you can map out cheaper ways to expand or make it harder for others to expand. You can build into cities that aren’t directly next to each other, but then you’ll have to pay all the connection fees to get through a blocked city.
The last part of the round is the bureaucracy phase. This is where you turn in your resources and power up cities, thereby getting money based on how many cities you can power. A player can technically have more cities than the ability to power them, or burn resources to power more cities than the number of cities he’s built. (You can’t get change for powering more cities than you have though.) After everybody is paid, resources are replenished according to the chart in the rule book, and turn order is determined. The person with the most cities goes into the 1st spot on the turn-order track. In case of a tie, the person with the higher power plant goes first.
Phase 2 begins when a player reaches a specific number of cities, and Phase 3 happens when the card is pulled from the power-plant deck. The end of the game is triggered when a player builds a specific number of cities, and the person who can power the most cities after that round wins the game. In case of ties, the person with the most money wins the game.
I already mentioned that I enjoy the bidding mechanic of this game, but change-up of turn order is also a great mechanic. The person who has the most cities goes first for power plants but last for buying resources and building cities. It allows other players to catch up and keeps one person from running away with it. The key to the game is expanding at the right moment where falling in turn order isn’t going to hurt you too much.
Money management is also crucial to this game. You don’t want to overspend on power plants because you still need money to buy resources and build cities as well. And if you’re late in turn order, you might get blocked out of certain cities or else it might cost you more to build. Also, somebody might want to trigger the end of game quickly before anybody can build up resources to power more cities. There never seems to be enough money to do everything, so you have to prioritize some hard decisions. Sometimes you think you have another round, when in reality, somebody’s trying to end the game immediately.
For the first of my recent Power Grid games, I ended up winning after the tie-breaker for our 3-player game. For the second one, I came in a three-way tie for first in our 6-player game but ended up coming in third because I didn’t have any money left. I keep kicking myself because if I didn’t buy my last power plant, I would’ve had a lot of money left over and more likely would’ve won the game by beating the five guys in the room. Next time!