I have not had too much time and opportunities to play board games recently. Fortunately last friday we tried Power Grid for the second time. It´s just incredibly good and addicting game. I had similar thoughts about it from the first time around but now that we tried it again I´m very convinced! This is at the moment the greatest board game available!
The game itself is somewhat complicated at the beginning, but the complex rules are quite intuitive in the end. The idea is to compete against other players about building power plants and to provide energy materials to them.
You are constantly trying to manage your limited monetary resources to buy better plants, to provide fuel for the said plants and also to create a sufficient chain of plants around the map with cities that are connected with power grid. You will also need to count the costs for moving electricity between cities.
The greatest thing in this business is the logic behind buying fuel for the plants. This has been designed following the logic guidelines from the real life system where the costs rise if some material is more wanted that the others. For example in the beginning of the game the coal is very cheap material to use for your plants, but if everyone concentrates to build coal burning plants the prices will go sky high and the availability of the material may diminish or even end totally. At the same time some better materials, like burning carbage, is cheaper in every following turn. And if you manage to get hold of wind turbines, they do not need fuel at all (though they are quite hard to get and the bidding for these plants are furious). Only complain is that the game developer gives bit too much advantage for using nuclear plants.
My player opponent also thought that it would be good idea to create a sales logic to sell the rights to pollution levels.
We have now tried this game with 4 and 5 people and both seemed to work very well. The game play was also quite different both times and there was no straight forward winning method available. Actually the games were very intensive to the final rounds and it was never obvious that someone would be in better position than the others in the end game. The game takes pretty long time, both times over 3 hours, but it was never dull in any point of the game.
More information about the game from here:
Power Grid @ Boardgame Geek
