Power Grid

Since stealing pictures from Boardgamegeek is for some mystical reasons impossible for me I’ll have to praise all those different arguments that convinced Tella to buy us camera. Thus I’m forced to take my own pictures – may them be as good as from BGG…

Funkenschlag aka Power Grid is very good economic-strategy boardgame where playeres take the roles of electricity-companys who try to attend as many clients as possible. For that one have to buy powerplants, build electricity lines, obtain fuels and prevent other players to do the same thing…

Game board is double-sided – on one side there’s the map of U.S, on the other side there’s the map of Germany. Both maps are divided into six areas, each containing 7 citys. Division of that kind allows players to use different parts of the map with different number of players. It’s rather easy to follow the borders

There are many kinds of power plants and fuels. For plants there’s importance of price (upper left corner), consumption and type of fuel (down left) and amount of citys this plant can supply with power. WIndmills produce green energy and therefore don’t need fuel. The last of them should be thermonuclear powerplant which neither doesn’t need any further investment after purchase. The price in the upper corner is not the final price but rather initial price. When player had decided which powerplant he/she would like to buy an auction starts. The initial price may be set higher than base price on the card by the player who put it on auction. Oftentimes green power is rather valuable and that kind of plants are sold for massive price.

There are four types of fuel in the game – coal (brown), oil (black), garbage (yellow) and uranium (red). When purchasing fuel one must consider the current price and future market. Often it’s not very wise to buy crapload of coal when You are about to swich Your old plants for new ones (unless they use the same type of fuel). Uranium is rather expencive at the beginning but later on that changes.

Game is very well balanced – when someone is left behind with buildings he/she has massive advantages when buying power plants, fuel and buildings. It’s not nice to be the first. All the fuel will be bought right under Your nose… Not nice at all…

I also brought the expansion from Essen that contains bunch of power plants that can be added to the game. There’s some really brutal plants there. Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to play with them yet. The plant on the right is the one I got for free (well, I did have to donate at least an euro to get it but that doesn’t matter anyway). But I’m afraid it’s only a requisite since the background is a bit darker tone than the rest of the cards. I would be perfect when playing in the dark room.

Very nice game. Takes exactly the right amount of time. 8/10

P.S. We also got us a brand new washing machine – that surely brought this to my mind….