FallCon - A Cornucopia of Gaming

Power Grid is definitely a Fallcon game. It has been on our schedule for a number of years and has been a favourite of the organizers and a lot of Fallcon attendees.

Power Grid is not a short game but it is a lot of fun and engages players' math and auction skills.

Power Grid is:

• Designed by: Friedemann Friese
• Published by: Rio Grande Games
• Number of players: 2-6
• Playing time: 120 minutes
• Player ages: 12+

Rio Grande Games is a publisher of many fine games and their dedication to quality and excellent customer service sets them apart. The version that I am reviewing is for the Rio Grande version.


This game is about buying power plants, bidding on resources (coal, oil, garbage and uranium) and expanding into cities and finally powering those cities with electricity! At first look, it may appear to be less than thrilling but it is far from that! In fact, it is a very exciting game!

The winner of the game is the one that is able to power the most number of cities at the end of the final round.


The game is procedural and proceeds through 5 phases. In each phase, the player takes a specific action defined for the phase. Each phase is relatively short and thus makes for a quickly paced game. A game with six players can take a little over two hours. Shorter games can be played by fewer people in about an hour.

The game is played over several rounds where each round consists of 5 phases:

• Determine Player Order
• Auction Power Plants
• Buy Resources
• Build Cities
• Bureaucracy

Each player begins with 50 elecktro (currency to purchase plants, resources, cities). The first phase is to determine player order.

The second phase is an auction where a certain number of power plants are put up for auction. Each power plant requires a particular resource and can power a certain number of houses. At the begining of the game, the power plants are weak and require more resources. Later on, they get more powerful.

In player order, a power plant is chosen and is then bid on. The successful bid wins the plant and that player is no longer eligible to bid on a power plant for the remainder of the round.

Each player can have at most 3 active power plants.

In the third phase, in reverse player order (last to first), players buy resources to power up their power plants.  The more resources that are bought, the more expensive it becomes. I consider this to be the fun part of the game because by carefully managing (or extending) your cash, you can ensure that you snap up the resources at the best prices.

During the fourth phase, in reverse player order, players expand their electricity network by buying stakes in cities. At the beginning, there can only be one player per city, then two, and finally 3 players per city.

And finally, in the fifth phase, players consume resources to power up cities. The more cities a player supplies with electricity, the more money they get for the next round.

The winner is the one who, at the end of the bureaucracy phase, powers the most number of plants. If there is a tie, then it is the player with the most money who wins!


Power Grid is an excellent game. I play this with my young cousins who are in elementary and middle school. They love the theme of getting power plants, buying resources and providing electricity to cities. It's a simple game to teach but it is quite involved. There is a lot of mental arithmetic that you need to keep track of.

Power Grid is a longer game but is accessible to a greater range of players and ages. If you have a chance to try this game out at Fallcon, I would strongly recommend you do.

The best part about Power Grid is that there are several expansion maps you can play on. Each map has slightly different conditions which give the game longevity and excitement!

Happy Gaming!
Thushyanthan

Howdy folks!

This is the Fourth installment of our first interview series with local gamers, designers and game shop owners. The first series is with members of the

Game Artisans of Canada, a homegrown Alberta group of boardgame designers.

They are officially joining us this year at FallCon to showcase a lineup of their best prototypes. All of these games are fairly late in development, there are no raw designs, and some of these games have already been submitted to publishers! Now you have an opportunity to play the game and offer your comments on the game play…before it even goes public!
  

 This Interview is with Rob Bartel. Rob is a prolific designer based out of Edmonton who currently works as a designer for BioWare, an Edmonton based video game studio. Seems like a great and natural fit! He will be running three official tournaments this year at FallCon. Busy Guy! He is highlighting a series of small fast play games he has designed in a series reminiscent of sports from the golden era. I have play tested a couple of these and I really like the idea and play of the games.

What are your current favorite three games and why?

Power Grid - This game includes such a wide array of different mechanics in such an elegant way. As long as there's one experienced player there to handle the nuances of the power plant deck, it flows very smoothly.

Container - The economic model can be brittle sometimes but it's so unique and interesting in how it plays out. Certain aspects of it are almost cooperative because you want your opponents to be wealthy enough to buy your goods. The fact that a local Alberta publisher (Valley Games) publishes it is just icing on the cake.

Small World - The game can seem intimidating at first glance and there is a lot of strategic depth and variability to it. The actual game play is very easy to play and simple to teach, however, to the point where I could see introducing it to non-gamers (provided the light-hearted fantasy theme works for them). We'll see if it continues to hold my attention over the coming months and years but, for the time being, it's on my hot list.

How long have you been playing games? What’s your earliest recollection of playing a game?

I grew up on the mass-market classics like Clue, Risk, Operation, and the Game of Life. My cousins were farmers and the Farming Game often came out when we visited, as did Pit and Stock Ticker. On the other side of the family, the speed game Dutch Blitz was almost a family tradition. Games seemed to be everywhere when I was a kid and that probably has a lot to do with my attachment to the hobby today.

Have we heard about any of your games yet? What is the status of them?

I've signed four games with publishers at this point and the first is scheduled to come out this November. It's possible that some pre-press copies will be available in time for FallCon and will be available for play there.

That would be great Rob, make sure you hook up with me, I would love to have a look at it.

How long have you been designing or tinkering with designing a boardgame?

I was introduced to game design back in 1994 when I was introduced to a RISK variant that captured my imagination and I continued to tinker with and evolve that variant over the years. Boardgame design didn't became a major hobby for me until the fall of 2006, however, when I was first introduced to the new game play coming out of the eurogame movement. Since that point, I haven't looked back.

What was the first boardgame you designed? What ever happened to the design?

The first boardgame I designed from scratch was Caribe, a strategy game about colonizing the Caribbean islands in the age of sail. I sent it around to some international design competitions in France and Italy where it always placed highly. In 2007 it won the Hippodice Award (Germany) for Best Full-Length Game. Despite the accolades, however, it's still looking for a publisher.

Where do you start the design process?

It varies. Some of my games start from taking an existing game design in a radically new direction. Caribe, a 90-minute strategic brain burner, began with the concept of taking a speed-based card game like Dutch Blitz and playing it out in slow motion. Others begin with a cool theme or with an innovative mechanic that I want to explore. Still others come from a particular emotion I want to evoke or from specific component limitations that I impose upon myself.

What’s the creative spark that gets you excited about one of your designs?

Much like my design process, I find inspiration from a wide range of sources. I'm not prone to designer's block so there never seems to be a shortage of ideas so it's just a matter of picking the ones that excite me and following through. Sometimes games get abandoned once the excitement for them fades; sometimes they just get put on the shelf temporarily while I work on another design.

What are your favorite game mechanics?

At this point, I don't have any specific game mechanics like Gerdts' Rondel or Knizia's auctions that I find myself repeatedly returning to. Perhaps I'll settle into a specific game play style or choice of mechanics over time but, for the time being, my games remain fairly diverse.

What themes (if any) are your favorites?

I work with a lot of fantasy and science fiction themes as part of my day job so, for the most part, I find that my boardgames tend to explore real-world themes of a more historic or modern nature.

Can you let us in on any designs you are currently working on?

Sure. I can't talk about any of my games that have been signed for publication until they're officially announced but the big project I'm working on right now is a series of vintage sport-themed card games that I'll be self-publishing in 2010 under the Famous Games label. There are currently six games in the series (baseball, tennis, car racing, football, hockey, and golf) each of them designed for two players and half-hour playtimes. They're small enough to fit in your pocket or take on the plane and will be affordable enough that you can purchase the whole series for less than you'd spend on a single typical board game. I'll be hosting some Famous Games tournaments at FallCon on the Saturday and Sunday so sign up early to secure your spot. 

Can’t wait to try them Rob, the covers look very attractive. See you at FallCon in a couple of weeks!

Thanks for the interview Rob, good luck on getting some of your designs published and with your future ideas.

 Peace

 

 

Registrations

Registrations are coming in fast and our game events are filling up quickly. If you intend on getting into our moderated events, we would strongly recommend you register as soon as possible as we already have several full, or nearly full events.

Full Events:
Circus Maximus
Small World

Games we expect to fill within the next week:
Advanced Civilization
DBHx: Waterloo
Rise &Fall
Agricola
LeHavre
Descent
Dominion
Galaxy Trucker
Rails of Europe

Auction Info

We've added an Auction Info section to our Information pages. There you will find our selling conditions, procedures as well as the Item Submission Form for download. If you want to speed up your submission process, fill out the form prior to your arrival at the Con and have the games and form ready for submission.

We also created a geeklist on BGG to list the games you intend on bringing to the auction.