Interaction III: Power Grid = Medium Salsa
Posted by Rob Herman at February 5th, 2006
A game with no interaction is dull. Nobody goes to a party to play Snakes and Ladders or Yahtzee. On the other hand, some people find games with lots of interaction too intense, or too draining to play for a long time. Multiplayer games often feature a cutthroat mentality that is off-putting to many people. My mom refused to play Hearts, among other games, because she hated the aggressive aspect of dumping your points on the other players. Plenty of people eschew Diplomacy because lies and betrayal are the way to get ahead.
Power Grid is a game that strikes what I think is an excellent balance between the white bread of Yahtzee and the sinus-blasting wasabi of Diplomacy. For those who haven’t played: the object of Power Grid is to build stations in, and provide power to, a certain number of cities. As you build and power more stations, you get more money, which at first glance makes it seem like your lead would build on itself—the rich getting richer. However, several mechanics stop this. First, leading players have to buy resources (the coal, oil, or uranium to run their plants) last—after other players have bought the cheap resources and driven prices up. Second, leading players have to build additional stations last, often losing access to the remaining cheap, desirable locations. Finally, leading players must commit earlier to buying additional power plants in the auction. These expenses can easily offset the advantages of having more stations—so much so that players might deliberately slow their growth to keep from suffering too badly.
It is possible, then, to act aggressively towards other players. You can try to buy up the resources they need, expand to the cities that are convenient for them, or bid up the prices of their power plants. Money is very tight, though, and any action taken out of spite will severely cut into your own advancement prospects. Victory is achieved, not by attacking your fellow players by keeping a careful eye on the game state and finding the best bargains, given their actions. That coal plant might seem like a better bargain than the uranium plant, for instance, but if two other players already have coal plants, their competition for the resource might drive the prices too high. Building is cheap in the Northeast, but if everyone else is trying to build there, the Midwest might be a better value. An oil plant isn’t as cheap to run as a solar plant, but if bidding has driven the price of the solar plant through the roof, you might be able to run the oil plant for less money and use the rest to expand.
Power Grid is, of course, not the only game that strikes this balance. Puerto Rico seems noninteractive until sudden, fierce competition strikes for scarce buildings or cargo space. It’s hard to do much damage to someone in Settlers of Catan, even with heavy use of Soldiers, and sometimes it seems like everyone is engrossed in their own tiny empire. But games are won and lost on the wise choice of trading partners and timing of trades.
Let me call these games carefully interactive, and I hope I will remember the term. The feeling of winning these games is the delicious feeling of a well-constructed, well-executed plan coming together. Losing usually doesn’t engender anger at being attacked, or frustration at being thwarted, but admiration at seeing the same thing from a fellow player (and hopefully, the chance to learn).
[Yes, I know I call people cheap whores after they beat me at Catan. That’s only because it’s true, and I stand by my points.]
Hmmm… I think your description of Power Grid is about 80% right; my gripe is that the final round of a Power Grid game is all about aggression. At first I thought that Power Grid was essentially a game of making many small optimization decisions, ie, looking for bargains, but the more I play it, the more I think that this is only part of the game. To recap, for people unfamilair with the game, the objective in Power Grid is to build little settlers-like houses on the board, and then power your houses with Power Plants. The first person who builds a given number of houses, let’s say 15, triggers the end of the game. Every player gets to finish the current round of building activity, and then whoever has the most powered houses wins. All of this building is done using monopoly money as the resource.
The key is, you may only have three Power Plants at the same time, and they can power between one and six houses. At the beginning of each turn, before new houses are built, the players bid in an auction for new power plants, but each player can only buy one each turn. If you buy a fourth, you simply discard one of your existing Plants. This is where the aggression comes in. If your opponent has Power Plants with capacities 5+5+5, he can power 15 houses. So, if you have 6+5+5, you can power 16, so as long as you can build that many houses, you are going to win, assuming your opponent can’t expand his capacity. So, in the final round of the game, he bids on a 6 capacity plant, worth let’s say $30, you can stop him by bidding up the price too high for him to buy it and still build enough houses to match. It’s not uncommon for someone to bid on a plant, which they essentially do not need, until the price is more than triple it’s initial value, just to prevent another player from getting the capacity he needs. This plant may very well have gone for around $30 the turn before, but now that’s it determines the winner, the price may skyrocket above $100. Getting forced into a bidding war you can’t win by an opponent with a slightly larger pocketbook is a fairly maddening experience that I think I can put in the ‘highly aggressive’ category (due to my desire to punch Greg in the face).
I’ll agree with you that the last round of Power Grid tends to get _very_ tight and calculating and, yes, aggressive. If you don’t like it, I’d suggest the house rule that powering extra houses does not help you win the last round–cash on hand is the only tiebreaker among everyone with at least the minimum number of houses. People generally have that much power available well before the last round of the game.
Well, I actually think that the end of the game tension is one of the best aspects of the game. But then again, I like Diplomacy.