You start with a bit of money, which you use to acquire a power station by bidding on those on offer against the other players, then buying fuel, acquiring supply contracts with cities then making money by burning your fuel in your power stations to produce power which you sell to your cities. Repeat until game end.
The game uses the terms:
phase - each of the above activies (eg buy fuel, bid on power stations) is a different phase.
round - one complete cycle of the 5 phases
step - the game progresses through three steps, each of which can contain multiple turns
i.e. the game structure is:
Step 1
Turn, consisting of Phase 1 (determine player order), Phase 2 (buy power stations), Phase 3 (buy fuel), Phase 4 (build), Phase 5 (bureaucracy)
Turn, consisting of Phase 1 (determine player order), Phase 2 (buy power stations), Phase 3 (buy fuel), Phase 4 (build), Phase 5 (bureaucracy)
...
Turn, consisting of Phase 1 (determine player order), Phase 2 (buy power stations), Phase 3 (buy fuel), Phase 4 (build), Phase 5 (bureaucracy)
Step 2
Turn, consisting of Phase 1 (determine player order), Phase 2 (buy power stations), Phase 3 (buy fuel), Phase 4 (build), Phase 5 (bureaucracy)
Turn, consisting of Phase 1 (determine player order), Phase 2 (buy power stations), Phase 3 (buy fuel), Phase 4 (build), Phase 5 (bureaucracy)
...
Turn, consisting of Phase 1 (determine player order), Phase 2 (buy power stations), Phase 3 (buy fuel), Phase 4 (build), Phase 5 (bureaucracy)
Step 3
Turn, consisting of Phase 1 (determine player order), Phase 2 (buy power stations), Phase 3 (buy fuel), Phase 4 (build), Phase 5 (bureaucracy)
(step 3 may be only one turn long, or may have several turns)
The balance of the game is primarily controlled by the player ranking. The player with the most cities is considered to be closest to winning, has the number 1, and is represented by a brightly lit bulb. The players with the fewest cities is considered to be furthest from winning, has a larger number, and is represented by a dimly lit bulb. The player ranking is NOT the same as the player order. The order in which players play, during most phases, is from the 'worst' ranked (ie largest number) to the 'best' ranked (ie lowest number). Since, in most phases, going first is an advantage, this has the effect of boosting the players with the fewest cities, and penalising the players with the most.
The game starts in Step 1. Step 2 starts the round following the first time someone gains a certain number of cities (7 cities, for 5 players). Step 3 starts when all the power plants (numbered from 03 to 50) have been revealed The games ends at the end of the first round that two conditions are both met:
the game in is Step 3
at least one player owns more than some fixed number of cities (15 for 5 players)
The victory is decided upon:
who powered the most cities at the end of the final round
if that is tied, then number of cities owned
if that is tied, then cash
Strategic and tactical decisions:
Start in a cheap area, or in a less populated better connected area
Pay high prices for stations with low or no fuel costs, or get cheap stations with high fuel costs
Replace stations often, or hang on for ones you can keep until the end
Speculate on fuel prices going down, or hoard and drive the price up
Burn only efficient stations to power some of your cities, or burn them all and hope fuel gets cheaper
save up money and build fewer cities, so you can move earlier the following round
There is some diplomacy, and elements of bluff with the bidding, but the main interactive element seems to be guessing the intentions of the other players. Which round the game will actually end on, and whether someone is going to try for burning more cities than the minimum required to trigger the final round have a high importance, which is good (in that it leaves you guessing who will win right up to the last minute) and bad (in that it makes the game a bit more random, or at least more dependent on knowing the game so well that you can predict what the other players' optimal move is).
What did other people think ?
I didn't like it that much. It went on for ages. I've used "the Tikal effect" to describe slow, draggy games where you spend most of your time sitting around waiting for other players to act; PowerGrid? is like Tikal on tranquilisers. Though I guess that might have been partly because we were all fairly new to it.
I also felt it had needless complexity. It's the opposite of something like Sparklies, in which a simple ruleset gives rise to interesting emergent complexity: PowerGrid? has an extremely complicated ruleset and nothing very interesting seems to emerge from it. For example, the fluctuating fuel price, and the way you can affect it by stockpiling, sounded like an interesting mechanic when you described it; but in practice the price of fuel is small compared with power stations and cities, and the fluctuations aren't huge, and most importantly, the fluctuations you can control by the limited amount of stockpiling you're allowed to do are dwarfed by the natural fluctuations caused by other players simply buying what they need, so it doesn't feel like a way in which you can actually affect the game in any meaningful sense. I don't feel the game would play any differently if the fuel prices were constant.
There are complicated rules about the three steps, the things that trigger them, what changes between them, exactly when the auction switches from step 2 to step 3 and how many stations are for sale at any time, and so on, which feel a bit like sticking-plasters stuck over edge-cases which would otherwise break the balance of the game. (Interestingly, I think this is how some people on ToothyChat the other day said they felt about PuertoRico and OnTheUnderground, but I don't.) --Rachael
That's a shame - I've narrowly missed chances to play this and I'd heard good things about it. --SGB
On the other hand, I liked it a lot. I agree that the fuel purchasing price fluctuation is nearly irrelevant, and could be replaced by standard prices (2 for coal, 3 for oil, 8 for garbage, 12 for uranium) without much loss of strategy and with quite a bit of simplification. And Rachael's right that it does have a modicum of the Tikal effect, sitting around waiting for other players to act, though I think this will be moderated by growing familiarity. Other than that, I very much like it and want to play it again. I think the step/turn/phase terminology is incredibly confusing, but a good diagram could do wonders, and having someone who knows the rules will help too. --AlexChurchill
Vitenka agrees with many of those points. The game was quite fun - but far too slow and long. Most of the changes on step made an absolutely minimal difference, the end of game condition was pretty arbitrary and the amount of control you had over resources was distracting compared to the amount of difference board position made (which was very very hard to read after the first stage) Even with all those criticisms - there was some strategy, there was some tactics and, unusually, I was able to see something I flat out did wrong early-on which made me lose. But some of the mechanics need a lot of streamlining, and there is too much of a negative-feedback loop, which pushes players to a more equal position but means which is usually a good thing, but here feels a little overpowering. Overall, thumbs up but needs a heck of a lot of speeding up.
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