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Power Grid

Expert Power Grid is an efficiency calculation: income divided by resource cost per turn. Turn order in bureaucracy is everything—being last lets you buy resources cheap and expand into contested cities last.

Quick winning principles

  • Buy the cheapest plant that powers your current cities plus one—never skip efficiency for a future plant.
  • Stay in last place on bureaucracy when you need resources and city access.
  • Trigger Step 2 only when you have a plant that uses the new resource mix.
  • Count elec capacity: one leftover power is wasted money every turn.

Ideal strategy

  1. 1

    Turn-order auction: bid exactly one more than the plant is worth to you—overbidding drops you to first place and raises resource prices.

  2. 2

    Plant efficiency: oil/coal hybrids at 2:1 city ratio are the expert baseline until Step 3.

  3. 3

    City count timing: expand to seven cities in one turn to end the game when you can power all seven.

  4. 4

    Resource market: buy when third-from-right slot is cheap; opponents in first place will drain expensive slots.

  5. 5

    Plant discard: force Step 3 by buying the highest plant when your engine supports uranium or renewables.

  6. 6

    Endgame: power plants 25+ with seven cities beats a larger network that cannot power.