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Best game for aspiring German bureaucrats: Power Grid

Funkenschlag!

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Power Grid
Dylan Matthews is a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox's Future Perfect section and has worked at Vox since 2014. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy.

Board Game Geek review: 7.9/10.0 (34th).

Power Grid is like Ticket to Ride, except instead of building rail infrastructure, it centers around building out an electrical grid. Players gain footholds in a number of German cities by supplying coal, oil, garbage-based, nuclear, or renewable energy. That earns their power companies money, but they’ll need to spend a lot to get the latest and greatest power plants and to build connections to more and more cities.

The game makes it easy to limit play to a few German states for games with fewer players, and the market for raw oil, coal, garbage, and uranium features prices that rise with demand, a startlingly realistic touch in a game that is otherwise not overly complex. The game is currently only available in physical form, so iPhone/Android practice isn’t possible.

Buy at Amazon: Power Grid ($37.45); Power Grid: Factory Manager ($38.09); Power Grid: First Sparks ($37.96); Power Grid: Brazil/Spain and Portugal ($28.88); Power Grid: Northern Europe/United Kingdom and Ireland ($20.15); Power Grid: Russia and Japan ($14.99); Power Grid: Québec/Baden-Wurttemberg ($13.27); Power Grid: Australia & Indian Subcontinent ($17.90); Power Grid: France and Italy ($20.30); Power Grid: Benelux/Central Europe ($13.99); Power Grid: China and Korea ($14.99); Power Grid: Expansion Deck ($10.25); Power Grid: The Robots ($9.98).

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