The Tao of Gaming

I played Power Grid and Around the World in 80 Days with a new group. (And it's nice to find another new group in San Antonio).

Power Grid has an evaluation problem: How much to bid on a plant? For example, in the early game there's only one reasonable plant available. The next plant (on the future market) is great. But the replacement plant (top card of the deck) may be terrible and show up instead of the great plant. Or it could be a plant that is good, but not great.

This probabilistic evaluation showed up several times last night. But I've noticed ... even if you can set a value that completely encompasses the risk of the future, the actual future will often be quite far away from the evaluation. [This issue shows up quite a bit in my work, too, and I want to explain it with technical terms like "Strongly Bimodal"]

To make this easier to explain, let's take the reverse. One good plant available, two players, and the next plant to fall into the market will be bad. However, there's a plant (or two) in the deck that are great and will go into the the market. [The rest of the plants wont, or are terrible].

The good plant will be bid up, of course. But each player will have to weigh the fact that they could get a great plant (cheaply) if they drop out. That lowers the premium that should be paid. So if you are willing to pay 45 (say), that's because you'd normally be willing to pay 50 (if the next plant was guaranteed to be terrible), but factor in a chance of something good happening. That's valued at five. (All numbers made up).

Here's the thing. I place the value of 'a good plant may show up' at five (or whatever). But once the card flips, I'll usually get zero (bad plant) or some high value (good plant bought at face value, instead of bid up). Call it forty. So the risk premium is five, but the actual value is never five.

This is like having an auction game where one item you can bid on is worth a zero, unless you roll 11+ on 2d6, then it's worth sixty. I don't think I'd look too kindly on such a game.

Power Grid has lots going on, but as we move up the learning curve, I expect more games to be won or lost on the turn of a card. [My last BSW game was a runaway when I got a good plant for face value on turn 3 or 4]. And this will be true even if everyone values the risk correctly. If the "turn of the card" premium is correctly evaluated and followed, some number of games are going to have one player jackpot or crap out. [The 'crap out' option leaves the other n-1 players all fighting evenly].

I've been thinking of Power Grid as a "Top Ten" game. (I've played 50 times on BSW, and probably 30+ face to face). But this fact has been gnawing at the back of my mind for a while.