I spent some quality time in Brettspielwelt playing Power Grid. I hadn’t tried it there before, but the interface turned out to be rather obvious. I had only one problem: the message window was only one row tall when I expanded the window to full-screen size (a must when playing Power Grid).
I played three games, twice with three players and once with two players. All games stressed the importance of the limited fuel supply. In the first game, I was frankly screwed — I was buying last and the other players wouldn’t let me have enough fuel. That was bad. I managed to hang along and finally placed second. In the second game, in the other hand, I managed to reach the second place, when in the last round I bought out the coal supply, dropping the second-place player to merely 12 cities. Nasty move!
The two-player game, in the other hand, was totally ridiculous. I had a strong lead, I got much better income going on and was sure to win the game easily. Well, it wasn’t that easy, when I ran out of fuel at the time I had 20 cities and could connect to 21 anytime. The other guy just kept buying all fuel and connecting cities. I replaced my power plants and finally won the game when he forgot to buy some uranium for his nuclear power plants. Had he done that, he might have actually won the game. That was annoying, but it taught me a lesson, I suppose. I don’t think the two-player game is particularly fun, really and I would never play it outside BSW. In BSW, I might be persuaded to try it.
The three-player games, in the other hand, were great fun. I like Power Grid very much. In the economic games front, Age of Steam reigns supreme (because I like cruel), but with only a slightly higher than Power Grid. Besides, Power Grid is available at the Brettspielwelt and Age of Steam isn’t… Both are brilliant games, and the BSW conversion of Power Grid is well done. The interface is mostly quite obvious and easy to manage.