After watching Michael Owen put two goals past the Russians, we stopped watching the England game at half-time reasonably confident of a home win (final score 3-0, Owen 7', 31', Ferdinand 84') and turned to the Italy expansion of Power Grid, one of our favourite games.
Andy and James started next to each other in Tuscany whilst Kieron established a base in Sicily, figuring that the expensive connections would be offset by not having to fight over the towns. With three players however, there was plenty of lebensraum for everyone, and very few towns had more than player connected even at the end.
The game played out very differently to previous times. The expansions were steady and measured, several turns had players not bidding for power plants, or not building to any new cities, and this allowed us to play out different strategies rather than chase the person expanding the most.
We realised that a sudden late surge to build up to 17 cities, even if you could only fuel a dozen of them, could win you a game. Andy was first to try this and unfortunately, although he could fuel the most cities at the time, he fell just a few Electro (the game's currency) short of building the 17th city he needed to win the game.
The following turn there was lots of costly bidding for final power plants, crucially allowing James to secure 5/6/7-sized power plants against Andy's 5/5/7, and so James was able to fuel 18 cities and win the game. Andy's shortage of money meant he couldn't fuel all of his cities and so Kieron, with less cities than Andy but enough fuel for all of them, pipped him into second place. A really fun evening. Top game.
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