Power Grid -- featured on Games From The Cellar this week.

gamesfromthecellar.com/episodes/power-grid

Worth a listen for a 20+ year old game that still goes toe to toe with modern titles.

I might have to hate-listen to this one. Power Grid is my personal turning point from Eurogames.

dysjunct wrote: I might have to hate-listen to this one. Power Grid is my personal turning point from Eurogames.

Power Grid was the first hobby board game I decided I never wanted to play again...and I haven't 12+ years on. Many other titles have been added to the list since, but it was a turning point for me as previously I'd play pretty much anything.

I love Power Grid, even though I traded it away a couple of years ago (only one group would play it and there were two other copies). I'm an ex power engineer plus like building, network, and low-compexity economic games so this was always going to be a fave for me - this and Silverton are just games in that niche that I'll always play even though they are not in the AT/Adventure genre of games that make up most of my collection.

dysjunct wrote: I might have to hate-listen to this one. Power Grid is my personal turning point from Eurogames.

This is a good one to hate listen. I think (like my review of Nexus Ops), that this episode has something for everyone.

Well, 88% of everyone.

I gotta admit I thought I was kinda done with it. I traded my copy away and hadn’t played in nearly ten years. But I enjoyed coming back to it more than I thought I would.

I have a couple of gamer friends who are both finance types, I really want to get power grid (and that FF stock game...Bull Market?) to the table just to see what it's like to play against others folks presumably quick with math

Am halfway through the episode (I listen to podcasts mostly in the morning when making lunch to take to the office and when outside doing yard work, so my sessions are intermittent) and you guys are still talking about how the game went, which is encouraging from a design level, in that not only are all of you, a bunch of reviewers, talking about how the game functioned and why, but also because the game functions on multiple levels, which has always been one of its hallmarks. Unfortunately, you've also touched on the aspect that I never really enjoyed because it's too train game-like: you can get locked out of the best spots on the board and then just have to sit there through the rest of the game doing less than those people who did get into those spots and waiting for it to end. I think PG has more outs than many train games because of the variability introduced by the auction and reacting to the way the market moves based on what kinds of fuels people are getting into, but there's still often a sense of inevitability where decisions made early doom you to irrelevance. And it always struck me as strange just how impactful the turn order becomes, as it's often difficult to change that.

I think a lot of more modern system/network games use a reset to try to avoid that inevitability, as was my experience with Brass: Birmingham recently (there are two different "periods" in Brass and all of your first period stuff gets swept away in the reset unless you poured enough money into developing them into second period stuff) but PG is not one of those. In the same way that games like Root function better with more experienced players, I think PG does, as well, which would normally be a point in its favor for me, but I think games of this genre are just not my thing.

Oof - the train-game connection. Yeah, it is a bit of a problem, but I think PG works around it in a way that I prefer to train games. If someone boxes you into a corner, you *can* escape by paying for multiple connections to get you to a city in the clear. Other players don't benefit (such as paying right-to-use) other than potentially slowing you down slightly. And when you look at it, paying to skip over one or two cities in the NorthEast to get to a clean station is about the same cost as making a single connection out west.

Luckily, when you power your stations, they don't need to be connected. If they did, I would agree that it would be a major problem.

I find it hard to lock someone out in PG just because of the 3 stages of getting into a city. If 2 players dueled to lock down an area another player can come in the 3rd phase and buy into ALL OF THEM. Deliberately buying places to retard another players ability to spread cheaply is a key element, I'm sure a ridiculous amount of mathy brain power went into deciding how much cost went into each gap and where to put in those double cities. I often started "away" from the more congested areas knowing that while it slowed me in the beginning, it often let me explode out in the end, buying enough cities to end the game while I couldn't power them all, but could power more than anyone else.