The final piece of this week’s package on prospects for 2010, players who might jump on to the 2011 list, is up. If you missed the main list, it starts with numbers 1 through 25. I’ll have one more piece on prospects next week, possibly Tuesday. As for Ulysses, I have four sentences – running twenty-odd pages – to go, so I’m hoping to write it up on Sunday or, at worst, Monday.
I got the board game Power Grid
The idea of the game is to build a power grid across a map of Germany or the U.S., including power plants and power stations in connected cities. You can have up to 3 power plants that run on coal, oil, garbage, uranium, coal/oil (hybrid plants), or green sources; except for green power, the others require players to purchase resources in each turn to fire the plants and power the cities. The first player to build a network of 17 cities, with the capacity and resources to power them, wins the game, with the magic number varying slightly depending on the number of players.
The great hitch in the game is that the power plants each take different inputs and power anywhere from one to seven cities, and they come up for auction rather than selling for fixed prices, while resource prices vary as well depending on how many players are chasing those inputs, which can change as each player upgrades his plants. It’s a complicated economic question: costs vary, and the marginal revenue from powering another city is positive but declines slightly as the number of cities in a network increases. I imagine that someone could build a model (I’m thinking Monte Carlo simulation) to figure out what these plants should be worth, or roughly what they should be worth depending on when they come up in the game, although I think that might ruin the fun.
With three or more players, two competitive dynamics come into play. One is the map – for the first part of the game, only one player can occupy a city; in “step 2,” it’s two players per city; and it’s never more than three players per city, giving multiple opportunities for a player to block others and prevent them from expanding their networks, deliberately or as part of naturally expanding their own networks. A player could have the money and power plants to expand his network but be slowed dramatically because he has to pay extra – a lot extra on the western side of the map – to go through someone else’s network, and while I’m not sure if it could happen in practice, I think I could see how a player could end up pinned in for several turns while he waits to accumulate the cash to expand out of region. The other is the competition for resources, which are refilled at fixed rates for each step of the game, so they can be depleted if too many players need them to power their plants – in fact, I can’t see how in a five- or six-player game you wouldn’t run into shortages, forcing players to change their plants and perhaps driving up purchase prices. And uranium is refilled so slowly that there’s a severe disincentive for two players to run nuclear plants simultaneously.
I did mention drawbacks. One is that it’s a mediocre two-player game, because the constraints don’t really constrain. You have room on the map, resources won’t be depleted, and the auctions don’t get too crazy – my wife and I engage in de facto collusion, so we buy plants at face value unless it’s a green one. Three works, although I’ve only played two games with three, and I imagine four would be perfect and five-plus would be a little cutthroat. With three players, each game took over an hour, so a five-player game could certainly run two.
Another is that the board is drab. I don’t care that much about artwork, but my wife really dislikes the game because she says it looks depressing – and she’s right about the cards with the power plants on them, which depict varying levels of air pollution. It wouldn’t stop me from playing the game, but it will stop some people, and for what these games cost I think it’s fair to consider the artwork.
And the third is that the mechanics of the game are complex. To keep the game in balance, the game author had to put a number of unnatural rules in place, including artificial constructs like the shift from step one to two (when any player has seven cities in his network) or two to three (when the “Step 3” card comes up in the power plant deck) and a table for how many resources to add back to the resource market at the end of each round … it’s a lot to keep track of over the course of the game, and we usually screw something up, somewhere, like forgetting to put coal back in the market one turn only to wonder three turns later why coal is so expensive. Even the order in which the players go in each round varies – you set a new player order each round, but then for some phases in the round, players go in reverse order. Yeah. I imagine the more you play, the more natural it becomes, but I don’t see it ever become as intuitive as most of the games we enjoy.
I’d recommend Power Grid because I enjoy playing it, especially the economic twist from the power plant-resource interaction, but I know from your feedback that you guys are split between folks who like the quicker-to-learn games like Ticket to Ride or Dominion and those who think I should be playing more Agricola and Puerto Rico. Power Grid, to me, is more for the second camp than the first.
Bought Ticket To Ride on your recommendation. My family loves the game. However, we have found that the game is biased toward longer routes (i.e. attempting longer routes is more likely to promote winning). To make the game more fair we employ the following rules:
– In addition to the longest route 10 point bonus, there is a most routes completed 10 point bonus
– Rather than earning more points for completing longer legs, each train laid is worth one point (i.e. a six car leg is worth 6 points, rather than 15). This also significantly simplifies scorekeeping.
I recommend trying a game under these rules.
the 1910 Expansion
for Ticket to Ride includes a most routes completed bonus – I believe it’s 15 points.
I really dislike a rule that awards just one point per car laid, though. Building longer routes is much more challenging, and the rewards have to be higher to compensate you for it.
I just bought Power Grid – Factory Manager with the hope that it was as playable as the original but without many of the artificial constructs that are clunky or hard to remember. It is supposed to be more two-player friendly than the original as well, which drove my decision to grab that and Le Havre. I’ll keep you posted on how they each compare to the others you have recently mentioned.
Keep playing, have fun.
KLaw, if you want to play a prettier game (and one that is a lot of fun), I can’t recommend Small World highly enough. It’s a fantasy conquest game that is both simple to learn and strategically deep.
Keith, it should be pretty hard to get blocked in Power Grid because you can always build in a nonadjacent city by paying the extra connection costs (relatively cheap compared to your income.)
Thanks Keith for bringing the 1910 expansion pack to my attention. I will be buying it. One of my other minor complaints about the game is that there are only 30 routes. Looks like the 1910 expansion will remedy that.
Re: Keith’s point that the rewards need to be higher for the longer routes – there are four “rewards” to building long routes:
1. The value of the routes per the route cards is significanlty higher
2. You get rid of your trains faster, which can enable you to stick your opponents with unfinished routes
3. The point value of the longer legs is way higher than the point value of the shorter legs
4. 10 point longest route bonus
These four rewards throw the game out of balance, favored toward the player who attempts the longest routes. The rule adjustments i suggested in comment #1 add balance to the game.
The fact that you can’t connect through cities outside the playing area is a major limit on adding to a network, especially in step one. But even after that, adding a city via multiple connections can be quite expensive, more so if you use the western regions.
Anyway, the way I phrased it in the blog post is wrong – I’ll take care of that tomorrow. Thanks.
Keith – definitely agree with you on your qualms with the game. I’ve only played Power Grid a couple of times and it’s only been in 2-player format. I do find the game to be flawed with just two people – the auction part is almost nullified, competition is very weak for resources, and I find having to use all 21 cities a bit boring for topographical strategy. My friend and I finished our second time playing it with 21powered cities each, except he had $52 left and I had $49.
However, I really see the merits in this game for more people, and agree that it is a brilliant design and setup. Agricola still remains my favorite game, however.
Played Power Grid recently and I enjoyed it although I did find there was a lot to learn & I was at the decided advantage of playing against two high schoolers who had already figured it all out. They LOVE this game. That’s a pretty good recommendation, I’d say.
Power Grid is definitely in the second camp. Again, it’s one of my favorites, so I’m glad that you enjoyed it. The best part about the game is that everyone is really in the game until the end and whoever executes the best is the winner.
I recently played Stone Age on your recommendation, and really liked it once I got past the tremendous amount of luck that is involved in the resource purchasing part of the game.
Nice review. I purchased the game but haven’t had a chance to play it yet. When you’re reading the instructions for the first time, it looks daunting to say the least. It still looks like a lot of fun for intense board gamers.
BTW, this blog is great. Books, board games, and food are some of my favorite things. Looking forward to reading through all your posts!
It’s definitely best when playing with 4 or more players. Having more players than available spots in the cities adds an important consideration to placement strategy.
If you like Power Grid you should definitely check out Container (www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/26990/container) — it has a robust economic engine and, like Power Grid, no clear path to victory.