PinkFae Archive #53: Board Game Review: Power Grid

In this, the penultimate entry from the PinkFae Archives, we have the last board game review I wrote for that site. It was originally published on 11 February 2017.

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In my quest to play eighty of the top 100 board games, I have finally been able to play Power Grid. I first heard of this game when I read the Cracked article 6 Board Games that Ruined It for Everyone. That article lists Monopoly as the worst board game of all time. Perhaps it's only fair to say it's the worst widely known board game of all time. But the article goes on to recommend Power Grid instead. The article states:

Power Grid is everything Monopoly should have been. You're genuinely aiming to build a monopoly, earning ever-increasing fountains of money, but you still have to spend every cent to stay ahead of the competition.

I've only been able to play once, but I already know I need to own a copy for myself. Let me explain why.

Let's look at some ratings:

Economic Domination Games

I know I keep referencing the Six Board Games That Ruined It For Everyone article on Cracked.com, but it's such a good article. The Top 100 list on Board Game Geek is awesome, but it doesn't compare bad games to good games the way the Cracked article does.

As an interesting side note, I saw that, if you reverse the order of the Top 100 List so that it shows you the Bottom 100, five of the six games from that article are listed. The one that's not? Risk. Which is interesting, given what I'm about to say.

Anyway. Here's what the Cracked article has to say about Risk:

The worst part of Risk is victory by excruciation. A well-designed game has tactics and skill building to a climax, a thrilling race to victory, and when someone has clearly won, it's because the game is over. In Risk, someone can win hours before it ends, and they will not let you just admit it and leave. They spent hours carefully planning this victory, and by God you are going to sit there and patiently lose for just as many hours so that they can enjoy it properly. They've turned having fun into a zero-sum game.