Power Grid: A Game Begging for House Rules
My husband (a power engineer) asked if I had any interest in playing Power Grid several months ago. His friends/co-workers loved the game and he wanted to give it a try. Since I’m always trying to get him interested in gaming, I jumped on the opportunity. We opened it up, tried to read the directions, and gave up to play Doctor Who Monopoly (another game we picked up that day) instead. We couldn’t have his friends show us, because they all worked different shifts. So my husband searched for a YouTube video on how to play, and the video was 35 minutes long. Wow.
We had all but given up hope on Power Grid when we decided recently to take it to game night at Claire’s. It was just going to be the four of us (Claire and her fiance, me and my husband), and since Claire’s fiance is awesome at figuring out games we had him take a look at it.
The rules of Power Grid are incredibly complicated, and not written in the most intuitive fashion. Several times we were left scratching our heads as we tried to figure out what all the rules meant. As we progressed along in the game we started picking up the rhythm of how the game was played and started having a good time. We were trying to outbid each other on power plants, Claire was getting smug about her lack of a need of resources with her California wind farm, and my husband was excited the price of uranium was decreasing as time went on.
We did find we weren’t playing exactly by the rules. We didn’t read the entire set closely as we began, but learned as we played (which seems to be the best way to learn these types of games). And we still don’t understand all the rules. One thing we all agreed on though, is that Power Grid needs house rules.
House rules, in my opinion, are what make some games great. Monopoly being the biggest example that comes to mind. Power Grid reminds me a bit of Monopoly, but with more dimensions (think Monopoly where you have to maintain properties). House rules are perfect fit. We’re still working on what our house rules will be but we have a few ideas:
- You can build multiple houses in a city at any point. We played this way because we thought it was how you played, but we found out later it was not the case. We all prefered this option, and we’re going to keep it.
- Resources count towards winning. The winner is whoever gets to 17 cities first and can power the most cities with the resources they have. We couldn’t figure out if that meant the extra resources you can carry. But it seems like it should, so we decided we are going to go with it. Wind/Fusion plants always can power two rounds (the maximum allowed for other plants).
- Any power plant on the board can be purchased. You can only purchase the cheapest four power plants of the eight in play. And then the most expensive goes back in the deck. But often we’d want the most expensive. We decided you can buy any power plan that’s visible.
This is just where we’re starting, and I’m sure we’ll add more. Power Grid is a fun game, but really needs house rules to make it more enjoyable.
The Germany side of the Power Grid board.
I also have to say I love that Power Grid has a double sided game board. You can play in Germany, or in the US. It’s not an expansion, it just is. I’m tired of all the expansions on games. Most of the time I just buy another game instead. While there are more counties you can buy as expansions, having a double sided game board makes it less painful. Plus, the expansions just aren’t more locations. They also have a “robot” expansion where the “robot” is the third player if you’re only playing with two people. Think of it like playing the computer in a video game. For $11.99 my husband and I will likely pick it up so we can play together at home. With house rules, of course.
What are your opinions on house rules? Do they make games more enjoyable, or just make it easier?
Update: I had the wrong terminology in the first bullet point. I’ve changed it from “multiple cities” to “multiple houses in a city.”
Written by
Nicole is a Software Quality Engineer, music collector, and chronic project starter. In her free time she enjoys reading trashy romance novels, catching up on her game backlog, and bourbon.
View all posts by: NicoleLeave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
As someone who understands the game this was cringe-worthy.
Specially when you deemed them necessary without studying/understanding the flow of the original game first and the reason behind the mechanisms.
The core of the game is progressing carefully in you building and purchase of plants, to get the turn order you want to buy an upcoming plant or be the first to build to block another player.
(And you can buy as many cities as you can afford during the building phase, just not in the very fist turn of setting/allocation.)
I must draw the comparison to Monopoly again. Those who “understand” Monopoly find house rules cringeworthy at best, and “destroying the children” at worse (seriously, there are posts about the latter). After all, the point is to strategically plan where your houses/hotels are, and how much money you have for rent. Something like winning money on free parking is against the very nature of the game.
But those rules make the game more enjoyable for some players, which is the point of the game. I’m sure Rio Grande would rather I play the game with some tweaked rules than leave it on the shelf. Enjoyment of the game helps it sell via word of mouth. Not to mention expansion packs.
As for your last point, I had my terminology wrong and have corrected it.
Everyone has a different tolerance for the complexity of a game. Some people want to just get started out of the box and have the tactics figured by the end of the game whilst others are content with understanding how the game dynamics work initially and gaining slightly more strategies and tactics with every play. Power Grid is definitely in the latter group but i do not consider it “complicated” to learn the dynamics. I’ll admit that i have and continue to play a lot of strategy games but i understood the mechanisms and rules of the game by the end of my first play and five games in with Power Grid have developed some distinct strategies. The beauty of the game is that after these five games there are so many possibilities for tactics that i am aware of and many many more i am not.
I mean this with respect but if Monopoly is your idea of a board game then Power Grid is definetly too complex a game to pick up and run with. I personally find Monopoly a mind numbingly boring time waster where all that matters is what properties you have the fortune or misfortune to land on. Any strategies in Monopoly are more than outweighed by the huge chance element and anyone who claims to b “good” at Monopoly should not go to Vegas as they clearly have not grasped the difference between luck and judgement.
It may seem like i am being disparaging but that is not my intention. I would merely point out that in all my experience of strategy games Power Grid is not one of the more complicated ones to learn but it is certainly one of the most rewarding. I would say that if you like Monopoly then surely you should dip your toes in games with a far lighter strategic element first and build from there. A lot of people start with Carcasonne or Ticket to Ride. Both of which are fantastic games but are quick to learn and have a fair amount of luck too.
I do love ticket to ride, and I’ll check out Carcasonne.
But honestly, I feel like house rules can make games that I’m not that into more fun. Which leads to more game play. And more game play leads to word of mouth marketing and more sales for the publisher. It’s a win for everyone involved.
I just found this article after googling something else, so you may have already realized this: I think your house rule about being able to build multiple houses in a city at any time means you’re missing out on a key part of the game: the cutthroat play of the map. Part of the strategy (and my wife and I love this part) is building to block off the other player’s options and force them to pay more. The game is designed so that in the early game, only seven cities per player are available. By allowing building into all spots in all cities, you’re now up to 21 spots per player! And it means that you can’t strategically choose where to build in order to force your husband to pay more, removing a lot of the tension from the game.
If I were to change anything about Power Grid, it would be to clean up the rules to make them easier to understand off the bat. And I’d open all six regions in a six-player game. But otherwise, I wouldn’t introduce house rules that reduce the conflict between players, because that’s the fun of the game.
Honestly, a cleaned up ruleset would have helped us greatly. The “any city” part in particular was something we thought we were supposed to do, and only found out later it wasn’t the way the game was written.
As far as conflict between players, I think if resources counted in the end, it’d actually increase conflict. Same with being able to buy the most expensive power plant.
However, the savings will undoubtedly be worth
the wait.