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Joe Gola
United States
Redding
Connecticut
Eleven.
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Some time ago I was in an anti-materialist mood and was looking through my game collection to see if there were any candidates for sale or trade. Naturally I had to turn it into a semi-scientific exercise, so I made up a little table of "sub-favorite" games which included their BGG rank, number of users wanting, number of users selling, and a little notation about whether or not they took up a lot of room; basically it gave me a rough idea of how "in demand" any particular game was. So, for example, I was able to see that Shogun, a game which is frigging enormous and which I thought was just okay, would be pretty easy to sell off at a good price.
Another possible candidate was Power Grid, one of BGG's favorite games but one which had never quite grabbed me and gotten me excited the way a meaty game ought to—you know, that sort of hold-your-breath feeling you get while you're waiting for your turn to see if your Evil Master Plan is going to come off or not. I thought that maybe the problem was that I was playing it with too large a group, since all my plays were with either five or six players and there was way too much down time for my taste. I decided that I probably wouldn't be able to judge the game properly unless I played it with just four, but of course the problem there is that it's such a popular game that if you bring it to a big game day the table is just going to fill up, and I can't turn people away just because I want to play it with a particular number.
This past Friday I finally decided to bring it to the Sandy Hook Beer and Games Society, which is usually a foursome. Power Grid is a little more involved than the games we usually play, but really the only difficult part is the administration, and I would be taking care of that. The game went pretty well, I think; I only forgot to mention one little rule during the initial explanation ("par," according to Chris B.), and no one had any trouble understanding what was going on. Most importantly, there wasn't any downtime problem. I was a little rusty and didn't do very well at timing my power plant purchases, and so in the end Chris B. was able to light up Germany better than the rest of us.
So, finally I got to play Power Grid with a smaller number of players, and my verdict is: it's okay. Previously I had rated it a seven out of ten, and now I'm waffling between calling it a seven or a six and a half. My take on it is that there are Big Things happening during the game that have a major impact on what's going on, but at the same time players are required to spin their wheels on lots of of nickel-and-dime decisions that don't always amount to much. For example, players have to mess around in auctions for a difference of five or six electros and then groan in agony when a much better power plant appears in the market to replace the one they just bought. Players can be perfect little money managers, figuring out exactly how much fuel to buy so that they have just the right amount of money for the build phase, only to watch someone else go into hyper-expansion mode and ruin all their plans.
I also find the amount of power plant market upkeep and administration to be annoying. I know that's kind of a petty complaint, but I'm not going to lie, it bugs me.
The bottom line is that to me Power Grid is a game that feels a bit watered-down; in my favorite games—games like Taj Mahal, Ra, and Amun-Re—I feel like every moment counts, like the results of a decision is commensurate with the amount of brainwork I need to put into it. In Power Grid there is stuff to think about and do, but somehow the heart of the game lies elsewhere. Certainly it's not a bad game, but to me it's not the standout that it is to most gamers.
On the other hand, I'll definitely say that it's one of the best-looking games in my collection. Or was. I might have traded it to Eric for his last Dogfish Head 90-minute IPA.
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