Making Germans Light Up – a Power Grid actual play
With one of my recent gaming group having left for six months, my friend Duncan arriving back in Australia after 4 years and a delayed departure of me and mine for Singapore, we decided to get down and dirty with some games last night. Duncan’s a board game person and so we busted out one of Duncan’s German contraptions: Power Grid.
Power Grid is a 2-6 player board game in which you play power companies competing to control the largest number of towns. To me this seems like a pretty weird idea for a board game, but it’s pretty good fun. Like most German board games you don’t confront the other players directy – the competition is over resources and the like. This leads to a nice social experience, but it’s also pretty complex so the conversation tends to be focused on the game.
The complexity, and the fun, come from a series of different rules mechanics. First of all, you buy power stations. For there’s a variety of different stations, using different fuel sources – coal, oil, garbage, uranium and wind. There’s also a variety of different levels of efficiency – some need two of coal to power one town, others can power five towns with the same amount. I won;t go into it here, but there’s also mechanisms to make sure that power plants are put into play in a fairly progressive way – you can’t buy a massive fusion plant in round one and you can’t buy a tiny coal plant in round 10.
To get power stations you have to bid against other players, but there’s only four plants available at any time. You can see what the next four likely power plants to come on the market are as well and this means that you can be strategic about what plants you want, while also trying to bid up other players.
Once you’ve bought a plant, you buy the resources to stock it. Again, this is more complex than it seams because the more of a resource that’s bought in a turn, the more expensive it becomes. Then you have to buy access to different towns. Since the aim of the game is to power the most towns possible, its important not to spend all your cash on plants and resources to power them with.
The variety of different subsystems keeps you on your toes and gives Power Grid a nice depth, but it also makes the game a little unfriendly to new comers and casuals. It’s definitely a geek game, unliek something like Settlers of Catan which you could teach your grandma in a single sitting. As a result, we decided we’d play again next week – it’s the sort of thing that will reward numerous sittings I think.