Power Grid

It's been a while since we've looked at any new board games. For my son's 15th birthday, I decided to check out a game I've been thinking about for some time, called Power Grid. It's highly rated on various board gaming sites and rightly so.

The main reasons I tracked down a copy of Power Grid include its basic premise of resource management and expansion/empire building elements, and the fact that people say it's just about as fun with two people as it is with three or more. This factor is important to us since many of the more complex board games require a minimum of three people to get the most out of them. We've played a few games with just the two of us and can attest that it truly is fun for two, although the game is designed to play with up to six.

In a nutshell, players try to supply power to the most cities as possible by buying power plants and the resources required for them. Much of the game comes down to the strategy of when to upgrade your plants and the condition of the resource market. Resources generally get more expensive as the game progresses as more players buy them up, especially if more than one or two people are using the same resource types. This balances out a bit in the latter half of a session when the more expensive plants come into play, allowing for a better conversion of input to output. In other words, you start with plants that can power one or two cities for two to three resources, but later one plant may only require one or two resources to power three or four cities.

Each game turn consists of five phases: you buy plants through an auction process, then buy resources, expand/build your power network into cities, and finally decide your income based on what cities you want to supply power to. The player turn order changes each turn, much like Aladdin's Dragons. The building phases reverse the order, so you may not always wish to be the turn leader. This adds another level of balance. The player that gets first dibs on a power plant won't get first grabs at the resources - a key strategy point as prices rise.

The basic game comes with a board that contains a map of the United States on one side and Germany on the other (the game was designed by Germans, of course!) Expansion boards allow for new maps of other European countries and I imagine we'll want to check those out soon. So far, there are two map expansions - Benelux and Central Europe and France and Italy for a total of four more countries. Late in 2007, a card deck expansion was also released, allowing for some truly customized scenarios or the ability to increase and balance the number of power plants.

Power Grid is one of those beautifully crafted games that is not difficult to learn, but very challenging to master. We didn't spend three hours trying to decipher the rules (although some rules could be clearer or organized better) and by the second game we had it down well enough to skip consulting the rules more than once or twice. The Gamers Cafe highly recommends Power Grid for all ages! There's some basic math, and some chess skills may come in handy (planning for future moves), so we recommend an age of ten or higher.

Check out our specialized Power Grid page for more information on the game, and how to play it online!