This article is about the board game. For information on electrical infrastructure, see electric power transmission.
Power Grid | |
In Power Grid, players compete to build up electrical networks from scratch and be the player to power the most cities at game end | |
Publisher | |
Players | 2 to 6 |
Age range | 12 and up |
Setup time | 10-15 minutes |
Playing time | 120+ minutes |
Random chance | Medium |
Skills required | |
Power Grid is the English-language edition of the multiplayer German-style board game Funkenschlag (in its second incarnation) designed by Friedemann Friese. Power Grid is published by Rio Grande Games.
In the game, each player represents a company that owns power plants and tries to supply electricity to cities. Over the course of the game, the players will bid on power plants and buy resources to produce electricity to provide power to the growing number of cities in their expanding network.
Game play
The game comes with a double-sided board with a map of the United States of America and Germany on either side. Either map is divided into six regions; before playing; you agree which region (or regions, with fewer players) that is off-limits and goes unused for that game.
In each round, players buy power plants in an auction, buy resources to power their plants, build new cities to power, and collect income.
The game ends after one player connects a fixed number of cities. The winner is the player who can supply electricity to the most cities with his network. Tie breakers first look at who has the most money, then the most cities.
Funkenschlag
The original game of Funkenschlag had players draw their networks using crayons instead of playing on a fixed map. This feature (along with other changes) was removed when Friedemann Friese reworked the game.[citation needed] The new game is also called Funkenschlag in the German market, but is sold under various names elsewhere.
Editions
The game is currently available under various names for different markets, most featuring the same game play. A few editions, however, offer a slightly different play experience because they ship with non-standard maps.
Funkenschlag/Power Grid
The German and U.S. editions are virtually identical and they feature the same Germany/USA maps. Any small differences are unintentional consequences of the translation from the original German into English, and most mistakes have been corrected by Rio Grande Games as new editions have been issued.
Funkenschlag: EnBW Edition
This edition was published in 2007 as a promotional tie-in with EnBW, a power company in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. The German map differs from the one in the original edition in that the city of Karlsruhe (the location of EnBW's head-quarters) appears rather than the neighboring city of Mannheim. The second map included in the game is a new map not available elsewhere, featuring EnBW's home state of Baden-Württemberg. A rule difference between this edition and the original is that determining player order is done after the power plant auction. A difference in the included power plant deck: with 41 plants rather than 42 in the original game, the deck does not include plant #29.
Vysoké napětí
The Czech/Slovak edition features the Central Europe map (from the Central Europe/Benelux expansion) and the Germany map.
Mégawatts
The French edition features the France map (from the France/Italy expansion) and a new map not available elsewhere: Quebec. The Quebec map makes more use of the renewable power plants to represent the regional availability of hydro-electricity.
Other editions
This section requires expansion. |
The game is also available in Polish, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, and Japanese. While these editions feature the original maps of Germany/USA (and thus are more like translations of the 2F game than a new edition) each new deal with a local publisher has coincided with a release of an expansion featuring that publisher's home country.
