German board games are so fun.
Emily and Danny introduced this game to Totof and me. It was at a game night at Emily's place. Emily and Danny are advanced gamers. So, whenever they show you something, it must mean this something is sophisticated enough and fun enough.
We had six people. Emily, Danny, Jason (Danny's college roommate), Dan, and us. Apparently Steve was also a professional gamer. It seemed like tonight would be tough.
Let's power up
The goal of Power Grid is to supply the most cities with power. You have six maps to choose: German, Italy, US, France, Central Euroupe, and Lux. Each map is designed marvelously. You do not feel you play in the same game when you change your map. You need to change your strategies and approaches to the winner position. The first part is auction. You obtain a power plant by auction. You do not need to get one if you do not want. As plants are purchased, newer more efficient plants become available so you're potentially allowing others to access to superior equipment merely by purchasing at all. The second part is to acquire materials for your power plants. Players must acquire the raw materials, like coal, oil, garbage, or uranium to power up their power plants. Unless your power plants use green energy like wind, you need to feed your plants materials. Some materials are more costly than others. For various reasons. More demand even though it is a common material. More efficient. More rare. Sometimes costly materials return you more pleasant results. For example, you just need to have one power plant to power 5 cities while another player needs two power plants to power his 5 cities. The third part is to buy cities. There is no limit on number of cities you can get at one turn. It depends purely on your budget.
The fun part of this game is that you need to think all strategies in parallel. You bump into financial crisis often. You struggle to upgrade power plants for maximum efficiency while you want to retain enough wealth to acquire materials or cities. You want to expand your network without spending too much. So you try hard to find a cheap route. But other players can see it too. They block you. Otherwise they go for the same route too. So there comes competition. In the first auction part, you do not want to lose your wealth. But you want others to lose their wealth. You need to position yourself carefully in order to get other people to pay more so they will not have enough money to compete with you in later stages. For material acquisitions, you can buy more than you need at this turn to let other pay more on their desired materials. But if you do not need those materials at next round, you will get a backfire. Those materials will go away and you cant stop it. Player order is important too. You do not want to show all your strengths immediately otherwise you will get the last order all the time. The last order would let you lose all your advantages dramatically.Fun, absolutely.
