Power Failure is a clever small-box game from Genius Games that rethemes a Taiwanese game called Power On!, taking some of the concepts of the great route-building game Power Grid while including a key message about climate change. Sometimes a game just hits you the right way; Power Failure has just so-so ratings on BGG, for example, and my daughter really didn’t care for it, but I think it’s both clever and fun. It’s great value at $17 or less, as on Amazon or Miniature Market.
Power Failure has two main conceits: You’re building an engine of power plants that you can fire once per turn, with each plant type requiring different fuel (in the form of cards); and building and firing plants usually involves adding carbon tokens to the shared tower in the middle of the table. When that tower falls, it ends the turn of the player who placed the last token on it, and everyone else has to discard a card from their hands, simulating the environmental cost of generating energy, especially through dirtier forms like coal and natural gas. At the end of your turn, you can “fire” all your plants of one type, and then use the total power you generated to claim a City card that represents the power demand of one city, which is the only way to gain victory points in the game.
Beyond the tower, this is a hand-management game – you get a hand of cards that include power plants, fuel cards for some of those plants, and special action cards. On every turn, you can take three total actions, which can include selecting a card from the common market, playing a card from your hand (building a plant or using a special action card), or firing up all of your plants of a single type. You can do the same action type twice, and in the first two or three rounds you’ll use all three actions to play or draw cards.
There are three main types of power plants in Power Failure, coal, natural gas, and nuclear; plus renewable energy plants that require no fuel and fire automatically on every turn. All power plant types require that you add one carbon token to the tower when you build them. Coal plants require one coal fuel card each to fire them, and you have to add three carbon tokens per plant when you do so. Natural gas plants require one natural gas card each, and you add two tokens per plant when you fire. Nuclear plants don’t add carbon tokens, but you need two separate cards for each plant you fire, one for fuel and one to represent the handling of the nuclear waste. Some renewable plants generate a variable amount of energy, from 0 to 2 units, based on the number showing on the top card on the deck, so you can’t build an entire energy strategy around them, but they can be enough to supplement your other energy sources to get you to a better city card.
Thus your goal is to build an engine of plants, likely concentrating on one type, that you can fuel and fire every other turn or so to try to fulfill a contract on a city card. The catch for coal and nuclear plants, which are cheaper to fire, is that they pollute. For every coal plant you fire, you must add three carbon tokens to the tower, and for every natural gas plant, you must add two. So you might build an engine with three coal plants, which would generate 18 power, enough to claim any contract in the game, but you have to add nine tokens to the tower, doing so one at a time. The tokens are hexagonal wooden pieces about a half-inch thick, and you can stack them flat or vertically, depending on how hard you want to make it for the next player. When the tower falls, your turn ends, you generate no power, and everyone discards a card, after which you reset the tower by starting out with three tokens and play resumes. There’s a little dexterity involved here, which does exclude certain people from playing, unfortunately. I do think the idea is clever because of the way it introduces variability into the mix – every form of power production pollutes at some level, but it’s hard to predict who will actually be the polluter to push the total over some threshold.
Games take 45-60 minutes, and I think it’s good for any age range that can handle the token placement part of the game. There’s some light text required, but it’s manageable for younger players. I also appreciate the color scheme, which is brighter and clearer than Power Grid’s fifty shades of grey. It’s a serious engine-builder at heart, though, with the dexterity element a small part of the game. You can play it mostly solo against other players, or you can play more competitively with a “take-that” strategy that swipes fuel cards your opponents might need. I think it’s a small gem of a game that deserves a wider audience than it’s gotten so far.