I've played "Power Grid" twice now, and both times I came in last place. Now that I have been a total loser at this game, I'm going to tell you all why I still had fun playing it, even while losing.
"Power Grid" is one of those heavy resource-management games. You play as the head of an energy company trying to optimize your power stations to supply energy to as many major cities as you can. The game ends when a certain number of cities have been built, and whoever can power the most cities on that turn wins the game.
There are basically two parts of the game that connect to each other - purchasing power plants and cities. You buy up cities (which gets more expensive over time) so you can use your power plants to provide them with power and earn money. To use your power plants to power the cities you have, you need to purchase resources, and as the game progresses, different resources become more difficult to obtain while other ones become easier to get.
The power plant mechanics are easily the most important part of the game, and a lot of care has been put into making sure the different types of plants are both useful for game mechanics and accurate for the energy that they use.
Coal starts out being plentiful and a good initial purchase, but slowly becomes harder to get and less efficient as an energy source. Oil is slightly better as time goes by, and hybrid stations can help a player shift from using coal to oil, or lets them purchase whichever resource is cheaper when it comes time to buy for their plants. Trash-using plants are initially not very efficient, but over time, as trash becomes more common, they become a viable supplement to the player's major power producers. Uranium is always an expensive resource, but a single unit produces high levels of energy. Green energy is the last "type" of energy, and requires no resources at all to power houses, but generally costs more than the other types of plants to purchase.
The different types of power plants allow for different types of strategies-> You can go for high-energy plants that might cost a lot to power, or invest in green energy to keep a steady supply of power without paying for resources, or use alternate energies to draw from resources other players aren't using. Meanwhile, you have to consider how many cities you are going to build versus how many you can afford to power.
There's also the fact that the person with the least number of cities gets a few advantages in their turn. They get to go last in power plant buying (which allows them to buy uncontested, and allows them to wait for better plant options to open up), they buy resources first, and they buy cities first. So a come-from-behind victory is possible, even planable if one does it right.
There is a limit to the number of strategies one can have though - and after a few playthroughs, players will have an idea of what makes the best strategy. That, and if you happen to have a large number of people learning the game for the first time (which we did on our first "attempt" to play), it can take awhile to learn and explain. But, as long as one person understands the rules, you should still be able to enjoy it.
With three people playing, Power Grid took us about an hour and a half to complete, but could last up to two hours or more, especially with more people playing. Not "Risk" or "Monopoly" levels of gameplay time, but set aside a game night if you're planning to play this game.
Overall, I'd recommend giving "Power Grid" a try, especially if you like resource management and strategic-building games. It's a pretty good game, and a fun way to pass the time if you want to try a new sort of game.
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