I have a small group of close friends I try to game with whenever I’m back in town. Getting all of us together at the same time is rare, but on one particular evening the stars aligned. All six of us were free, so we showed up at our usual board game café and asked the owner for recommendations that worked well at the six-player count.
Our group tends to favour competitive games - the kind where clever play and well-timed acts of spite are part of the fun.
One suggestion immediately stood out.
Power Grid.
Now, I’m primarily a sci-fi and fantasy reader, which naturally pulls me toward games with similar themes. So when the group latched onto a game about managing electricity infrastructure, I’ll admit I wasn’t exactly thrilled. Power plants and powering houses didn’t exactly scream excitement to me.
And yet, within about half an hour, I realized I had been very, very wrong.
Building the Grid
At its core, Power Grid is an economic strategy game about building a network of powered cities.
Players bid on power plants, purchase the resources needed to run them, and expand their networks across a map by constructing houses in different cities. Those power plants run on fuels like coal, oil, garbage, or uranium, all of which are purchased from a dynamic market where prices shift based on supply and demand.
The objective sounds simple: power more cities than your opponents.
But the path to that goal is where the real game begins.
A Surprisingly Cutthroat Economy
What surprised me most about Power Grid is how ruthless it can become.
Players can build houses anywhere on the map as long as they can afford the connection costs. In practice, this leads to some extremely strategic - and occasionally malicious - placement decisions.
Block a crucial route. Force an opponent to take a longer path. Drive up the cost of expansion just enough to ruin someone’s carefully planned turn.
It turns out that laying electrical infrastructure can be downright vindictive.
The auction phase is another highlight. Every round, players bid for new power plants, and at the six-player count this becomes wonderfully tense. Everyone wants the best plants, and every bid forces players to decide whether to push the price higher or back out before overpaying.
Timing and turn order become incredibly important here.
The Importance of Turn Order
One of the most fascinating aspects of Power Grid is how turn order works.
Each round, the player with the largest network goes last, while the player in last place goes first. That might sound like a disadvantage at first, but going later has its own advantages - especially when buying resources.
The result is a delicate balancing act.
Push too far ahead and you risk paying inflated prices for fuel. Hang back too long and someone else might sprint ahead before you can react.
I’ve seen games where a player quietly stays behind for most of the match, only to leap forward in a single explosive turn and win.
The Market Is Merciless
The resource market is arguably the heart of the game.
Coal, oil, garbage, and uranium all fluctuate in price depending on how much players buy each round. Early purchases are cheap, but the price ramps up quickly as demand increases.
This leads to moments of beautiful sabotage.
In one game, I had planned what I thought was a perfect winning turn. My calculations were precise: build five houses, reach seventeen cities, and power them all using the resources I intended to buy that round.
Then one of my friends noticed what I was about to do.
He immediately bought every unit of coal available in the market.
My power plants suddenly couldn’t run, my carefully calculated turn collapsed, and my victory vanished in seconds.
It was equal parts devastating and brilliant.
The Mathematics of Power
Power Grid has a reputation among players for involving a fair bit of arithmetic, and that reputation is well deserved.
You’re constantly calculating construction costs, power plant capacity, fuel consumption, and projected income. It’s not uncommon to see players quietly doing mental math while staring at the board.
The owner of our favourite café summed it up best:
“If you’re not playing Power Grid with two calculators, you’re playing it wrong.”
He wasn’t entirely joking.
Player Counts Matter
After several plays, it became clear that Power Grid truly shines at five or six players.
At these counts, the auctions are fiercely competitive and the resource market becomes a battlefield of supply and demand.
With four players, the game is still excellent and runs a little faster, but there’s slightly less pressure during auctions and resource purchases.
At three players or fewer, the game definitely loses some of its edge. With fewer competitors, the auctions feel less intense and the resource market becomes far more forgiving - removing some of the tension that makes the game special.
Final Verdict
Despite being first released in 2004, Power Grid still feels remarkably fresh today.
Its mix of auctions, route building, resource management, and economic strategy creates a deeply satisfying puzzle that rewards careful planning - while still leaving room for clever sabotage and dramatic turnarounds.
It may not have the flashy theme of many modern board games, but beneath that industrial exterior lies one of the most tightly designed economic strategy games around.
If you ever find yourself at a table with five to six players looking for a deeply strategic and highly interactive experience, Power Grid is absolutely worth plugging into.
