Power Grid: First Sparks and Power Grid: The Robots Now in Stores

Jan 15, 2012

Rio Grande Games has two new Power Grid releases now arriving in stores. Power Grid: First Sparks is supposedly very similar to the base game but plays along at a much quicker pace and is a stand alone title set in the Stone Age. Power Grid: The Robots is an expansion which adds robot players to the game.

From Rio Grande:

First Sparks: As clan leader you are responsible for the well-being of your clan during the Stone Age. You need to develop new hunting technologies and get new knowledge, to successfully hunt food or to learn to control fire. With help of these skills you will harvest enough food to feed your clan and to spread it far enough to reach new hunting areas.

In this game you are always confronted with manifold decisions: which technology cards offer you the biggest advantages, when it is the right time to spread your clan on the game board, which hunting areas will grant the most food? Reaching new hunting areas or trying to secure parts of the game board for your own clan are important factors for your strategy. Empty spaces are cheaper for your clan to settle in compared to spaces, where other clans already settled earlier. If you are the first to increase your clan size to 13 clan members you will win The First Sparks.

Also, Robots is coming to Power Grid but the inside dope is awfully slim…

This expansion can only be played with a copy of Power Grid. The game rules for Power Grid are the same. This expansion includes components and rules for adding robot players to the game.

Both new releases should be available this week.

On a side note, it’s really too bad that Rio Grande doesn’t really embrace the concept of getting pertinent information out there in front of the public. Not only is the rio grande website one of the most unfriendly and nonintuitive sites you’ll ever encounter in the hobby but much of the information that comes out for Rio Grande is very vague as to why you would want to purchase any their upcoming products. Honestly, this is going to come back to bite RG in the end as Dominion runs its course (some feel it already has) and I’d hate to see that as rio grande is a fine company but how can we in the hobby media cover something that we simply receive a sentence or two for us to discuss? Robot players in Power Grid? Does that mean an artificial A.I. that allows for bigger games with fewer players? That’s my assumption from those three sentences but how am I supposed to know?

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Jeff McAleer

Founder/Editor-in-chief of The Gaming Gang website and host of The Gaming Gang Dispatch and other TGG media, Jeff tackles any and all sorts of games but has a special fondness for strategy, conflict sims, and roleplaying games. Plus, he's certainly never at a loss for an opinion...