Power Grid: The Card Game | Rahdo's Final Thoughts

A video outlining gameplay for the boardgame
Power Grid: The Card Game.

Part I: Gameplay Runthrough

Part II: Final Thoughts

[Steve-L]

I like Power Grid, currently my 39th favorite game. And I watched Sam Healy's review of this and although he didn't seem to be a fan, it looked intriguing to me. My board game meetup played Power Grid fairly regularly so I thought it might get a chance.

I loved it. It currently is my 18th favorite game, so yeah, it's better than the board game. I found most of the Power Grid players liked it, maybe 1 or 2 did not, but 4-6 did. All, I think, liked the board game more however. But agreed a shorter version of the game has its place and can be more playable in those situations.

There was 1 player who dislikes Power Grid who liked this game!

It seems there is only a minority of people who like this more than the board game, but still has been successful for me. And still enjoyed by many.

[MichaelJunker]

Our experience has been without the map, the turn order mechanism has much less of a bite, particularly in 2 player games. My wife can usually just relentlessly focus on increasing capacity to beat me. I don't think you could get away with that in the full game where the map would kill you.
We still really enjoy it, and I can't see breaking out the full game, which she wasn't a fan of, for just us ever again.

[simonjrobinson]

It's a shame we didn't get to see the action of the final round, but I appreciate you were probably too busy for that. Great videos nonetheless! :)
Based on what you were saying about Jen, it would be cool if they could introduce some sort of expansion that addressed environmental issues and pushed you towards cleaner sources of energy. For example, the player with the least overall pollution count gains extra points.

[ビッグ-ボス]

I quite like it actually.. smaller and compressed, better looking design of an old looking game that I never quite liked for its gameplay.

..but paper bills?

[FishofMuu]

.... if you don't want it, I'll take it :P

[Nain]

I'm a power grid fan and I had bought this to see if it worked for two players. The game is not bad, and like you mentioned, without the map it could only be expected that a big portion of the game would be missing. But, at the end of the day, this game is far too light. It may serve the purpose to introduce new players into Power Grid, but I feel that there are far too many gateways or simple fillers that for the same time frame deliver so much more and are more entertaining than this. I' was a little disappointed with this version, I was hoping it would be a great 2-player version of PG.

[entrecruzado]

I have it but have not played it, eventhough I played big Power Grid and liked it but it's too long for my taste. I'm also not a big fan of area control. Most of my gamenights are with casual players and I usually go with lighter games. I also bought cheap plastic chips to replace the terrible paper money (IN ALL FF GAMES).

[Adtr]

I really disliked this game, especially with less than four people. My family liked it, but only because we were playing with the wrong rules. Without the resource tracks the resource market is a much weaker system than you would expect. And when you determine placement by how much money you make, the fun math is gone, whereas before you could have more cities than you choose to run, and the payouts are declining with scale, now it's flattened out most of the tactics. Once we used the right rules they hated it. It's disappointing, considering how portable and cheap this is. I hadn't even played power grid the full game when I owned this, I bought it later and much preferred the normal version.

[BoardgamesBourbon]

would you toss this in the hopper with Manhattan Project the card game? Two light versions of better games that are not bad, not great, but ok?