At my request, Mom gave me the board game Power Grid for Christmas. I think I described it to her as “complicated but fun”. I’d played it once, many years ago, and remembered it as a great game. We cracked it open on Christmas Day and learned how to play (it had been a while for me, and as I said, it was complicated).
It has cool little houses you build across a map of the United States (or Germany, the “B side”):
There are four different types of “fuel”, represented by little wooden pieces:
In the game, coal is represented by little brown cubes and oil is a black cylinder, but it drove Laralee absolutely nuts because she kept insisting “coal should be black!” So after the game we took permanent pens and painstakingly re-colored all the coal cubes to black, and the oil drums to silver. Actually, she was right– it felt much more clear after we finished.
We’ve played about half a dozen times since Christmas, teaching Hannah and Julian last weekend. Both of them liked it. In today’s game, Julian and I both felt a little bit like this:
… because Laralee is the absolute queen of this game. I can’t quite figure out her strategy, but it’s amazing. She wins every time. Today I was crushing her and Julian, on pace to win the game handily, when I suddenly ran out of money and couldn’t buy one last city to finish victorious. That gave Laralee one extra turn, and she managed to squeak out a victory using tie-breaker rules. Wow.
She celebrates her victory by imitating Wonder Woman:
Despite continual losses, I really enjoy the game and now have a goal to figure out how to beat her. (She reminds me this is pretty much how she feels every time she plays any other game against me, so I guess fair is fair…)