POWER GRID

OBJECTIVE OF POWER GRID: The objective of Power Grid is to develop your power generation company to power more cities than the other players.

NUMBER OF PLAYERS: 2 to 6

MATERIALS:

• a game board
• 132 wooden houses in 6 different colours
• 84 wood resource tokens (24 coal, 24 oil, 24 rubbish, 12 uranium)
• Elektro (the currency of the game)
• 6 game help cards
• 43 power station cards
• a step 3 card

TYPE OF GAME: auction based development board game

AUDIENCE: teen, adult

OVERVIEW OF POWER GRID

Each player runs a power generation company, and is responsible for supplying electricity to the cities. To do this, throughout the game each player buys power plants at auction, buys resources to generate electricity in their plants and builds a network to connect the cities to which they supply electricity from their plants. In the end, the player who supplies the largest number of cities wins the game.

SETUP

During each game the players have to choose in which regions they will play. The map is divided into six regions each with seven cities. In general it is recommended to play with one region per player. The selected regions must be adjacent to each other. The regions are not reserved for a particular player, so each player may develop his network in all the chosen regions. keo nhacai

After choosing the regions where the game will take place,

• Each player takes a game help card, all the houses of his color and 50 elektro
• Place the initial resources on the resource market at the bottom of the board.3 coal on spaces 1 to 8
• 3 oil on spaces 3 to 8
• 3 rubbish on spaces 7 and 8
• 1 uranium on spaces 14 and 16
• Place the remaining resources near the game board
• Place the power plant cards numbered 3 to 10 in ascending order in 2 horizontal lines next to the board to form the exchange market. The first line represents the current exchange market, while the second line represents the future exchange market.
• Set aside the step 3 card and the ecological plant card, then shuffle the remaining power plant cards. Remove a number of cards from the deck (depending on the number of players, see table at the end of these rules), then put the ecological power plant card back on top of the deck and the step 3 card underneath the deck.

GAMEPLAY

The game is divided into three main steps, during which the players will take turns. A game round is divided into 5 phases:

1. determination of the turn order
2. power plant auctions
3. purchase of resources
4. construction
5. bureaucracy

Certain game events will trigger the passage to a new step of the game, which will modify certain rules.

Phase 1 – Determining the turn order

The turn order is determined by the decreasing number of cities built. Thus, the more cities a player has in his network, the more he will play before the others. In case of a tie between two players, the one with the most power plants goes first.

Phase 2 – Power plant auctions

Each player will be able to buy one power plant, and only one, per turn. Following the turn order, each player can place a bid on one of the power plants present in the current market (first line). The other players then have the opportunity to bid on the proposed power plant. Once the auction has been won,

• If the player who won the auction is not the player who started the auction, then the latter can start a new auction. Otherwise, the next player who has not won an auction will have to start a new auction.
• A new power plant is immediately drawn and the two lines of the power plant market are rearranged, so that the power plants are always arranged in ascending order (lower value power plants on the first line, the weakest on the far left, etc.).

Other rules for auctions:

• The minimum price to launch an auction on a power plant must be higher or equal to the value of the power plant (indicated in the top left corner of the card)
• A player who has already bought a power plant can no longer place a bid
• As soon as a player buys his fourth power plant, he is obliged to discard one of his three existing power plants: if he has resources on this power plant, he must transfer them to his other power plants that use the same resource; if he has no more room or if he has no more power plants using this resource, he puts the resources back in the supply next to the game board

Phase 3 – Buying resources