Eric Raymond
United States
Malvern
Pennsylvania
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Friedmann Friese’s Power Grid is one of the acknowledged classics of the modern Eurogame genre. It embroils 2 to 6 players in a simulation of running power companies, competing to light up the most cities. Strategy involves a mix of positional play, resource management, and (most entertainingly) competition for new plants in an auction every round.
Since the game’s original release in 2004, Rio Grande Games has published an alternate power-plant deck and five pairs of expansion mapboards, introducing minor rules variations and new tactical challenges. My wife Cathy and I own all of these; we have been fans of the game since almost the date of release, and regularly compete in the World Boardgaming Championships Power Grid tournament.
With Power Grid: Robots, the game’s developers take off in a completely new direction. This expansion introduces robot players, assembled at random from tiles that define how they will behave in the auction, resource-buying, and city-building parts of each turn. With six possibilities each for five behavioral slots, one may face almost 7776 robot variations.
To give the flavor of the expansion, here are a couple of the easier-to-understand behavioral rules:
(Always bid for) plant using cheapest resources
Special ability: Start game with 100 Elektro (game money – 50 is normal)
In step 1, build one city: in step 2, build 2: in step 3, 3 cities (up to the limit of the robot’s cash).
My wife and I have played three 2+2 games – two human players plus two robots. We’ve seen 29 of the robot tiles in action, the 30th being disallowed in games with two or more robots. While there is a lot more behavioral space to be explored in other combinations, this is enough experience for some generalizations.
First: is this expansion worth your money? At less than $15 SRP we think the answer is an unequivocal yes. While it’s difficult to imagine the robots actually winning a game, they are surprisingly effective as spoilers and complicating factors even against players as experienced as Cathy and myself. They make it possible for two people to play a “honeymoon game” that is nearly as interesting as having four humans at the table.
Power Grid is one of those games that generally gets more interesting with more players. Four or five is generally considered optimal (most of the players I know rather prefer the five-hand game), and the most obvious use of this expansion generalizes what Cathy and I did with the honeymoon game for play sessions where you can only round up three or four players. I’m quite looking forward to trying a 3+2, 4+1 or 5+1 game with our Friday night group.
I shall at some point try playing a solitaire game against 4 robots just to find out how that goes, though I’m a little skeptical that the challenge level will be high enough to be interesting – seems to me you need human competition for spice at least in the auction round. In general I’d recommend at most a 50-50 robot/human ratio.
Second: Another promising use for the robots is as an instructional aid – you can invite a new player to start by running a robot until he or she feels competent enough to abandon the algorithm.
Third: Do the robots affect game balance? Yes, they do. They make being first up in the power-plant auction something to be more sought and less feared than in the base game. The reason: because you know the robots’ bidding rules in advance, you can manipulate them to buy junk plants you don’t want. Obviously this makes it easier to bring up plants you do want. In combination with the “Buy all resources” rule some robots have, you may even be able to throw the robots plants that will induce a fuel-scarcity squeeze for your human opponents.
Because the robots mitigate the risk of being first in the auction round, they tilt strategy towards building cities fast to get out front of your opponents on that curve, and then letting your capacity catch up. In the base game, of course, this strategy can crash hard if several successive auction rounds lead off with crappy, low-efficiency plants – but the robots give you a place to dump those.
On the other hand, the robots’ rules for Phase 3 tend to make them as prone to resource-hogging as the most rapacious human players. That aspect makes play a little more difficult, especially for the top-of-the-order player who must buy resources last. On the whole I don’t think that completely negates first player’s auction-manipulation advantage, but reasonable people could differ on this.
The result of these changes is a slightly different game, though not a less complex one. I think it will appeal especially to hard-core strategic minimaxers (er, like myself) who enjoy having more tools with which to manipulate the game state and more different pathways to victory.
Fourth: Are there any bugs in this expansion? Well…it does suffer from the chronic Power Grid problem of poorly-organized rules written by people who were thinking in German rather than English. It is not difficult to patch the rules for places where they’re a bit ambiguous, but if you have to do that it definitely helps to think like a computer programmer. My wife, a practising attorney who is thus no stranger to carefully parsing complex legalese, was nevertheless a bit at sea early on.
The production values are an improvement over the scratchy B&W printing of some previous expansions, and the robot tiles are done in an appealingly goofy retro-techno look.
All in all, if you are a serious Power Grid player – or even a casual one who has trouble putting together a table of 5 – you want this expansion. It’s fun, different, and genuinely adds something to the game.
(This review originally appeared on my blog, Armed & Dangerous.)
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Joshua Miller
United States
Holland
Michigan
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This is an outstanding and insightful review that really captures the essence of this expansion. Bravo!
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A Brave New Geek
United Kingdom
Southampton
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Thanks Eric - great review and insightful.
It seems interesting that being first in an auction round is less of a fear - would there be any way to randomise the robot's auction behaviour each turn and only reveal this information when it is the robot's turn to bid?
The wife and I just picked this up and are yet to read the rules so apologies if this is the question of a fool.
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David Etherton
United States
Carlsbad
California
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Quote: Because the robots mitigate the risk of being first in the auction round, they tilt strategy towards building cities fast to get out front of your opponents on that curve, and then letting your capacity catch up. In the base game, of course, this strategy can crash hard if several successive auction rounds lead off with crappy, low-efficiency plants – but the robots give you a place to dump those.
Great review, thank you! I've played First Sparks more than the original Power Grid, but I'm confused why being first in the auction round is bad? If anything it seems worse in First Sparks due to its "right of first refusal" mechanism.
In "normal" PG the first player still gets to decide which plant to put up for auction, right? So what's keeping them from putting up the plant they want and bidding it up if they can afford it? I'm sure I'm missing something here, just don't understand what.
(And yes, I understand why being first is bad during expansion and purchasing resources since those happen in reverse player order)
Thanks,
-Dave
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David Debien
United States
Round Rock
Texas
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etherton wrote: Quote: Because the robots mitigate the risk of being first in the auction round, they tilt strategy towards building cities fast to get out front of your opponents on that curve, and then letting your capacity catch up. In the base game, of course, this strategy can crash hard if several successive auction rounds lead off with crappy, low-efficiency plants – but the robots give you a place to dump those. Great review, thank you! I've played First Sparks more than the original Power Grid, but I'm confused why being first in the auction round is bad? If anything it seems worse in First Sparks due to its "right of first refusal" mechanism. In "normal" PG the first player still gets to decide which plant to put up for auction, right? So what's keeping them from putting up the plant they want and bidding it up if they can afford it? I'm sure I'm missing something here, just don't understand what. (And yes, I understand why being first is bad during expansion and purchasing resources since those happen in reverse player order) Thanks, -Dave
Hi Dave, I will try to answer this one for you.
By being able to look into the future auction, you can usually tell what next plant will come available once someone buys a plant in the current auction. Typically, those future plants are better than anything in the current auction. So, by going first in the bidding, you are opening up a plant in the future auction to those who go after you. The solution, sometimes, is to pass on the bidding entirely and sticking the next bidder with the same poor choice. However, that is the brilliance of PG. The person in 1st position usually has more cities connected than the other players, making them nominally in the lead. It's a brilliant catch up mechanic.
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David Etherton
United States
Carlsbad
California
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Ah, of course. That also explains why the lowest card gets tossed if no plants sold that round -- so the market won't stay wedged forever if it's full of crap.
Thanks David!
-Dave
ps. Interesting difference in First Sparks - the lowest card in the market gets tossed if it was already there at the start of the round, even if other tools (plants) get purchased. I'm a fan of First Sparks because it's quick enough to get played at work over lunch hour but I definitely want to kick the tires on the full Power Grid more often -- but it's hard to get enough players together for this one, hence my interest in the robots!
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Friedemann Friese
Germany
Bremen
Bremen
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abravenewgeek wrote: - would there be any way to randomise the robot's auction behaviour each turn and only reveal this information when it is the robot's turn to bid?
It is very important that the robot's moves are 100% predictable. Remember the robot is not another player, it is just used to interact with the game, but it is not designed to win the game.
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Joshua Miller
United States
Holland
Michigan
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friedemann wrote: abravenewgeek wrote: - would there be any way to randomise the robot's auction behaviour each turn and only reveal this information when it is the robot's turn to bid?
It is very important that the robot's moves are 100% predictable. Remember the robot is not another player, it is just used to interact with the game, but it is not designed to win the game.
Yes! Manipulating the robots and figuring out how to use them to your advantage is the goal.
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Ed
United States
Oakland
California
Wankel engine
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I played this for the first time yesterday with my wife and one robot. I found that this seems to reduce the competitiveness of the power plant auctions since, as you note, the robot became the dumping ground for undesirable power plants that ordinarily would have clogged the market. Have you found that to be the case in your plays of this? My wife aggressively expanded, ended the game quickly, and won despite being able to power only 14 cities, something I haven't seen in the base game. We got a couple of rules wrong (for example, we forgot to use our robot's special ability that gave it a free build each turn!) which obviously distorted the gameplay. Overall I like it and I think it does a good job of making Power Grid a good game with two players.
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Randall Bart
United States
Granada Hills
California
Red October
Earth is one of my favorite planets
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friedemann wrote: It is very important that the robot's moves are 100% predictable.
I agree with this principle. It's okay to have randomization of the starting city, but after that the robot should be 100% deterministic. I had a case where the robot was choosing among seven $17 cities. Sadly, no d7 was provided with the expansion.
Proposed deterministic rule: If two cities will cost the same to build, the robot chooses the one where the next city will be cheapest. This is done regardless of whether the robot will build another city. If still tied, look at the third city, and the fourth, etc. If this cannot resolve the tie, choose the first city alphabetically. Before playing on the France map assign the three parts of Paris the names Paris A, Paris B, and Paris C.
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etherton wrote: Interesting difference in First Sparks - the lowest card in the market gets tossed if it was already there at the start of the round, even if other tools (plants) get purchased.
Are you sure that in First Sparks the lowest card in the market gets tossed? It only gets one food on it.
It is tossed though when the 'Shuffle' card is drawn to reduce the market by 2 cards.
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David Etherton
United States
Carlsbad
California
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Lokertis wrote: etherton wrote: Interesting difference in First Sparks - the lowest card in the market gets tossed if it was already there at the start of the round, even if other tools (plants) get purchased. Are you sure that in First Sparks the lowest card in the market gets tossed? It only gets one food on it. It is tossed though when the 'Shuffle' card is drawn to reduce the market by 2 cards.
Top of page 6:
Quote: After all players have bought a new technology card or passed and the lowest technolgy card (with the free field crop) still lies in the market, remove the field crop, and place it back to the general storage. Discard this technology card and place it back into the game box. Draw a replacement card and rearrange all technology cards in the market in ascending order.
However, I definitely got this rule on page 5 wrong: (during the "auction") the first few times I played:
Quote: If players draw a lower card than the one that received the free field crop at the start of the phase, remove the field crop without replacement and place it back to the general storage.
-Dave
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David, you are absolutely correct on this one. And I have forgotten also the second rule you mentioned. Silly me.
By the way, have you tried Robots. Is it worth buying?
I like the 2p Power Grid. I know it doesn't have the auction tension a 4-6 player has, but it is different.
So, do the Robots spice up things the good way?
Thank you for your First Sparks rulings.
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David Etherton
United States
Carlsbad
California
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Steve,
Unfortunately I haven't picked up Robots yet. I haven't played "colon free" Power Grid with fewer than four or five players either, although I've played First Sparks with only 3 and it was great.
-Dave
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Burster of Bubbles, Destroyer of Dreams.
United States
Sunnyvale
California
Just imagine the red offboard up here. I'll create it Real Soon Now...
Yes, I know a proper 18XX tile should have a tile number.
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We've played about 15 games with the robots -- usually they are dead last, but we've seen the robot finish as high as second place in a game that ended a round earlier than most players expected.
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