Do not adjust your screen. I read online just about everywhere that Power Grid is a 2+ hour game to play IRL, and if I had read that before playing the game the first time, I wouldn’t have tried it. Power Grid is a wonderful game, and it’s even more so when you can fast-forward through the mechanical parts and get to the interesting decisions more quickly.
At my gaming group, we play Power Grid at least once a night, sometimes twice. A 4-player game takes about 45 minutes to play; 5-player is done in about an hour. Any other number of players and we play something else. A new player will add 15 to 20 minutes to the game, including the time it takes to explain the game (since that’s mostly done whilst playing, but that’s another article). Your mileage may vary, of course, but if you thought Power Grid was a long boring math test, it doesn’t have to be.
HARDWARE
It helps. Having the right stuff in the right place that’s easy to get to will greatly reduce setup/clean-up time, so I’m going to write about it.
Poker Chips: If you’re serious enough about board games to enjoy Power Grid, please, just go to Wal-Martâ„¢ and invest $20 in a set of poker chips. Make the commitment to never use paper money again. Not only is it a more pleasant experience but it really speeds everything up. You know, you can use poker chips for money in other games too đŸ˜‰
Boards/Cheat Sheets: I own the first 12 boards, and if you’re going to get more than 20 plays out of Power Grid, you’ll want to move past USA/Germany. Each board has different resource refresh rates, different rules for the power plant deck, etc. For this reason I keep a set of sheets I found on BGG upon which I’ve written where all the rules differ from normal. Once we’ve rolled the D12 to decide which board we’re playing, we only have to take out the board and the sheet we’re using and we’re good to go. Why do I bother telling you all of this? Because it saves us at least ten minutes in setting the game up because we don’t have to read through the entire rulebook for every map we play with to make sure we caught all the changes — it’s all right there.
The cheat sheets I use can be found here
PEEING
This is the single mechanic that has saved us the most time in Power Grid. Yeah, I’m serious. No, put your pants back on, not literally peeing on the board. That’s nasty. OK I guess I should explain this terminology. So one time I was HWinning (that means I was in last place. Am I gonna need a glossary here?) and after I bought my power plant for the round, I realized that I had my turn all planned out in advance and I didn’t really care if anyone else knew what I was going to do; I thought it was pretty obvious what I was doing anyways; so I took the money for my resources and stuck the resources I was going to buy on top of it (still in the resource market), then I did the same thing for the city I was planning to buy and just stuck my house and money on top of where I planned to build. Someone asked me what I was doing and I said “I’m peeing in a circle around my spot!” and it stuck.
Once the HWinning player has done this, though, the next-to-HWinning player may also do this and so on. True, it can give up a slight advantage to those who are “Winning” because they can plan better, but if the HWinning player(s)’ moves are obvious anyways, the Winning players were trying to do this in their head and taking forever to get to the same spot. If someone feels something is on the line, they just don’t pee that turn, NBD. This works particularly well on the first turn when the resources you buy are mostly scripted anyways. Sometimes buying resources and cities takes only the amount of time for each player to “relieve themselves” (that means put their money in the bank and put their bits where they need to go), which cuts a good 5 minutes off the game every turn.
In general, we use cities placed on their side to denote cities which haven’t been paid for yet.
SPECIALIZATION
The secret to our success is that each of us has a job that we do very well. There are almost always three people who are in every game we play and we have become very good at taking care of the game mechanics quickly. It certainly helps to have the same person do the same job, but dividing the roles this way will still make the game flow very smoothly even with people who aren’t amazing at it like we are. There are three core roles: Banker, Resources, and Power Plants.
Banker: This is my role, so there will be more detail about this one. The banker is responsible for making sure all of the money gets where it needs to go: making change, paying people, starting money, etc. As each person builds their cities, I look at how many cities they have and what they can power and put the money they get aside in a “staging area.” During bureaucracy phase, all I do is hand each person their stack of money, it takes about 5 seconds.
I should add that people tell me I’m amazing at this and when they play without me (which is rare but it does happen) the games take much longer. Man, sometimes I’m so awesome it causes me physical pain. My point is, though, that experience here has a significant effect on the length of the game.
Resources: Responsible for refreshing resources and making sure all resources are burned that need to be. He sets up the resources at the start of the game, and usually has a pile of resources ready to be put out for bureaucracy phase. With the piles, refreshing resources can be done very quickly (it can even be done while cities are being built) so bureaucracy phase takes no time at all.
Power Plants: Responsible for ensuring the power plant deck and market are where they need to be. Before the game he puts together the plant deck, and refreshes/adjusts the plant market when necessary. During the bureaucracy phase, when bottom-decking the “best” available plant, it really helps if he announces the plant that’s happening to: “3 Garbage for 7 Cities is getting buried this round.” Bureaucracy phase takes only the time he needs to announce what is getting buried, so 5 seconds.
I mentioned the length of the bureaucracy phase for each of these roles because it’s 5 seconds or less for all of them. This means bureaucracy phase takes less than 5 seconds, and it should be as short as possible! No interesting decisions happen there, so of course we should hit the fast forward button on it. This can be accomplished by doing most of the work while other people are making decisions.
CLOSING
Well I hope you found something you can do that makes your games go faster. I like it when games are quicker so yeah.