Fraser McHarg: Breaking the Power Grid drought

As a self confessed Power Grid completist I don’t play the game anywhere near enough.  Not a single game the whole time we were overseas.  Daughter the Elder had expressed interest, but unfortunately Melissa will very rarely play.

Finally, a few weeks after returning home I managed to break the Power Grid drought.

I already had the EnBW edition and managed to pick up Mégawatts during a trip to France and of course the Brazil/Spain & Portugal expansion and the special Umspannwerk card were a mandatory acquisitions for me at Essen.

I did try and play Power Grid with some friends when we were at Essen, but I stupidly left my copy of Mégawatts back at Wuppertal and thus we had no base copy of the game to play with even though we had the Brazil/Spain and Portugal expansion with us.

Back home my first attempt at EuroGamesFest failed to get any takers so I ended up teaching Dungeon Lords instead.  For the next games session I removed Dungeon Lords from the box and only took Power Grid boxes, thus enabling me to offer Power Grid or Power Grid or Power Grid…

After a couple of other short games I managed to convince some people to play and we chose the Québec map because nobody had played it.

On the first turn Carlos built all four cities in Montreal, the rest of us thought that this was a risky move, but it turned out to be quite reasonable.  Most of the rest of us competed in the area between Québec and Montreal.  Step 1 finished rather too quickly for my liking and four out of the five us started getting hemmed in between Montreal and Québec and our fifth player found herself suffering in some of the expensive areas to the East.  When step 3 began it was pretty much down to a two horse race and I had access to Montreal so managed to grab then win.

After one play I would say Québec is interesting, possibly a bit too tight for five players, but we certainly hadn’t thought out the possibilities of the big metropolitan centres.

Having given up on Melissa volunteering to play I offered to teach Daughter the Elder in a two player game, after pointing out to her that two player is really only for teaching and that the game is much better with more.

I gave her a quick run through the rules and we started playing.  Her game playing experience was quite evident as in one auction where she was the first player she realised that she would have to put a particular plant up for auction if she didn’t want me to buy it at face value, there was no need for me to point this out.

We played on the German map and the first thing she did was to look for where we lived when we were in Germany earlier this year.  Unfortunately although Wuppertal is technically in the top 20 cities in Germany it doesn’t make it onto the Power Grid map, some of our close neighbours Essen and Duisburg do though.

In the end, as the t-shirt says, it came down to money as a tie-breaker.  I had more money being the person who pulled out in a couple of bidding wars.  If I hadn’t dropped out of the auction on the last turn I probably wouldn’t have had enough money for the win.  Maybe with two of us persuading Melissa she might actually deign to play this game a little more!

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