Power Grid at PrezCon

I had two tries at Power Grid (designer Friedemann Friese, publisher Rio Grande) during PrezCon this year.  This is a game that I love to play but at which I certainly have no degree of mastery.  In other words, both my games were learning experiences.  We played on the map of Germany in both games. 

Image courtesy of
Rio Grande Games

I have a tendency to move out aggressively in terms of building power plants and connections, because I like to build up an income base early on.  The first game was no exception.  I think I led the pack in income per turn for most of Phase 1.  The disadvantage of my approach is that the more cities to which you are connected (or the bigger your biggest power plant as a tie breaker), the later you come in turn order for purchasing fuel resources and connecting to new cities.  The quickest way to build high-capacity power plants is to buy plants that are big fossil-fuel-burners.  Buying resources late in the turn means paying the highest prices for coal and oil.  So I really had a strategy that couldn't last. 

But the real problem in my first game was that Aaron Buchanan was at the table.  Aaron is a terrific game player, and in our game he had built plants up to a capacity of 13 cities.  Late in Phase 2, we were all hovering around ten cities connected and powered, when suddenly Aaron made new connections to five cities in one turn, which brought his total connected cities to 15 - the trigger for game end.  None of us was expecting that.  Although he could only power 13 of them, it was more than any of the rest of us, which won him the game.  I finished third of five, for what that was worth.

In the second heat of Power Grid, I played among a delightful group of players, all very good.  Kathy Stroh, Jake J., Leslee E. (if I remember right), and a fourth whose name escapes me.  I followed largely the same strategy (because, frankly, I couldn't think of what else to do) except that I bought a couple of nuclear plants to reduce my dependency on fossil fuels.  It's a good thing I did, because late in the game, Kathy and the player to her left colluded to deplete the coal market and made it impossible for Jake to power what could have been a game-winning 17 cities (if he had the connections).  The game ended with four of us tied powering 16 cities.  The tie-breaker is cash, and Leslee and Kathy were tied with five electros each.  The third place player had three electros, and I was dead broke, finishing fourth in what was by far my closest game ever.  Both Leslee and Kathy advanced to the semifinal.

My good friend Grant G. made it to the Power Grid final, where he faced Aaron Buchanan and Bill Crenshaw, among other top-notch players.  They decided on the central Europe map for the final round.  Grant finished in fifth, which he attributes to an unfortunate early selection of location.

I would like to get Power Grid, which is ranked 5th overall on boardgamegeek.com, but it does not come well-recommended as a two-player game, and it takes upwards of two hours to play.  I have doubts that it would work for my wife and me in our late-afternoon gaming sessions.

Next post:  Tickets, please...

An old favorite and a new discovery

My first victory at PrezCon last week came Wednesday afternoon in the first heat of Alhambra (designer Dirk Henn, publisher Queen Games), a favorite of mine.  It was a very friendly game, despite the propensity for Elisabeth P., a PrezCon newcomer, to continually buy the very tile I was looking for.  (How dare she?) 

Winning in the first heat qualified me for the semifinal the next day.  Somehow in the semifinal I had a hard time waiting my turn.  Three times I tried to skip Tedd Mullally on his turn.  He was a good sport about it; he didn't even break the skin when trying to bite my hand off.  ;-)  Despite what I thought was reasonably strong play, I came in second in the Alhambra semifinal.  Losing semifinals would be a recurring theme for me in PrezCon this year.

Later that afternoon, my friends Brian Greer, Keith Ferguson, Glenn Weeks, and I got together for my first full game of Stone Age (designer Michael Tummelhofer [pen name for Bernd Brunnhofer], publisher Rio Grande), a worker placement game that reminds me of both Pillars of the Earth and Agricola.  As such, the game continually poses a variety of options for limited resources, all the more challenging when only one player can grow the family, upgrade a tool, or develop agriculture in a turn.  The rest are left to claim victory point options and collect resources to pay for them - not to mention gathering food for the family.  In my case, I thought I played a relatively solid game, though not good enough to place better than third of four.  I like this game, although I'm not eager to buy my own copy, given its similarity to Pillars and Agricola.  Nevertheless, it's a very fun game in its own right.

Next, bringing power to Germany and transportation to America...

One day at PrezCon

So much happened at PrezCon that I think I'll take it a little bit at a time.  Wednesday opened with an introduction to Leaping Lemmings by one of the designers, Rick Young (the other being John Poniske, the publisher being GMT).  My good friend Glenn Weeks was already familiar with the game, so we jumped in for a heat, which was going very well - until one of my lemmings failed miserably at what would have been a five-point cliff dive if not for an ill-timed rock slide.  Despite my last-place finish, this was a great diversion, and I'd love to try it out on the kids. 

LL is a nice light-hearted title with a decent degree of strategy.  It vaguely reminds me of Lost World: Jurassic Park from the standpoint of being a fox-and-geese kind of game (outnumbered predators trying to catch prey running the length of the board), but LL is far superior to Lost World from a play balance standpoint.  Rather than having predator players vs. prey players, everyone controls one faction of prey (lemmings), and control of the predators (eagles) rotates around the board.  It would be interesting to modify LW:JP along the same lines.

Unfortunately, LL sold out pretty quickly at PrezCon.  We all found it surprising that GMT would release this kind of title.  GMT has a reputation for solid wargames and a few other represented genres, but LL is downright goofy by comparison with their usual line-up.  It's very interesting to see GMT branch out in this direction.  Regardless, LL is now at the top of my wish-list for family games.

More posts to follow over the next few days - games played and lost, games bought, and the status of a game sold.