Jan 10, 2012

Participants: Laurie, Abraham, Jon, Ofer

Power Grid

Laurie 17, Abraham 16+, Jon 16-, Ofer 15

We played on the northern areas of Germany. Its city connections are more expensive than the ones on the US East Coast map. Abraham and I crept up the west coast, Laurie started in the far north, and Ofer started off in lala land in the center east. He had his side of the board to himself the entire game, which resulted in a problem for him that I never saw before in a game of Power Grid. The three of us tripled up on every city in the west and north. Ofer literally had no city spaces left to buy on the board for any price, since all of them were full or already in his network. That’s why he ended at 15 cities.

There was a lot of stocking up on goods, so naturally the goods were all high priced and in short supply. In the last few rounds, all of our tactics had to work around this. No one was ever out of fuel that he wanted, as a result of judicious plant acquisition and simply not using one of the plants (both Abraham and I did this).

Three rounds before the game ended I thought that Abraham had the game fairly locked up in any case. He was delayed due to the fuel shortages, and then I thought Ofer might do well. Only on the last round did I realize that Laurie might take it. Only very briefly did I think I had a chance, but it didn’t last more than one auction.