8 people this week and a milestone I foreshadowed some time back. The 50th game of Power Grid, which is the first game to reach 50 plays at the club, at least as far as the records go back and I suspect even if we had records before 2003, there would not be any other games that have reached this figure.
The game was played on the Brazil map using the original plant deck and the Transformer station. The game was played using the 4 northern areas of the board including the expensive yellow area in the west. This prompted 3 of us to start out on the coast where the cheap connections are, while Steve H started inland to the south.
Coal has a low refresh rate in Brazil as compared to some other maps and I somehow contrived to corner the market on it (with plants 4, 10 & 25) which served to mitigate the potential damage as I was the only one who was regularly buying it. The transformer station appeared just after I had picked up plant 25 and I picked that up for 20, Nigel and Steve H had no "end" plant to attach it to, while Steve Pe had a 4 city plant, this proved to be a good buy, as it meant I could power 6 cities with 1 plant. After this the market entered a stall although Nigel was able to pick up plant 31 before hand, so when plant 26 came on the market, the bidding was intense, particularly as people had been stock piling money and the first 2 plants in the future market were 27 & 28 and the only potentially useful plant (5 cities or more) that could have come off the deck was number 20 (which turned out to be out of the game) and that had the problem of consuming 3 coal. I won the plant for 95 (and think it would still have been a good deal if I'd paid a fair bit more) and I think that was essentially game over, the 2 Steve's were stuck on capacity around 8 with no big plants in the offing and although Nigel had 12 capacity, his plants were all mid range, so that it was not so easy to upgrade his capacity.
On the next turn I was just short of ending the game when I was sitting on 13 capacity and the following turn, (step 3 having begun) I was able to just wait and pick up 1 of the 6 city plants at face value to give me 17.
It was a strange game in that both the Steves had something over 150 cash on hand at the end and even I had something like 50 having ended the game. Checking after revealed that the plants removed at the beginning had city values of 4,5,6,6. No resource had a serious shortage, possibly due to the fact that most of the wind plants remained in the game longer that they would normally. The price of Biogas (trash) had fallen to 1 at the end of the game due to the high refresh and the fact that the big gas plants came out only at the end.
Posn. | Player | Score |
1 | Dave D | 17 |
2 | Nigel | 15 |
3 | Steve H | 13+ |
4 | Steve Pe | 13 |
Over on the other table was Endeavor.
Posn. | Player | Score |
1 | Andrew S | 58 |
2= | Dave F | 56 |
2= | Paul | 56 |
4 | Colin | 45 |
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