Playing Power Grid (AKA Funkenschlag) Online
By Chris Mills
Power Grid (Funkenschlag in German) is one of my all-time favorite games. Although I don't play it quite as much as I used to, it remains on my list of top ten board games and the fact that I still enjoy it this much after sixteen years of playing it bodes well for it staying on my top ten list.
If for some reason you are reading this but are a little hazy on the Power Grid game, here's a link to the page for it on Board Game Geek.
Due to the Covid-19 outbreak in the US the restrictions on gatherings and the just out-and-out paranoia (whether justified or not) it has engendered have severely crimped our game playing activities and opportunities. I had first looked into playing Power Grid online a few months ago but shelved it. However, as the lockdowns and restrictions have continued (or returned) it made sense to revisit the topic. In addition, some gaming friends and acquaintances have forged ahead and started setting up online games, so after participating in a few of these I feel a lot more comfortable both playing the games online and discussing them. Kudos to Mike Munson, among others, for being a trailblazer in getting the Power Grid community into the online world.
At this time (August 2020) I only know of two ways to play Power Grid online. One is on the Steam platform, using a program called Tabletop Simulator. Tabletop Simulator costs $19.99 (US) for one copy. I believe there are bulk discounts, the last time I checked you could buy 4 licenses for $60, which brings the price down to $15 a copy.
The other way to play Power Grid is on the German website BrettspielWelt (which means Board Game World in German, and from now on referred to simply as BSW). It's free to register and play games on BSW, and Power Grid is one of the many classic Euro games available on BSW.
Having mentioned both options, I'm going to briefly discuss what they have in common and what the differences are between them. The paradigms behind each program are completely different.
Tabletop Simulator is not a game, per se. It is a shared board where the different players are all looking at the same map (in the case of Power Grid), the same plant market, and the same fuel market. There is also a bank where the players pay for their purchases and take their payouts from powering cities each turn.
TTS (the preferred abbreviation for Tabletop Simulator) has no logic on how the game is actually played. The logic it has is in keeping track of how much fuel is available and what cities on the board are available for network building. So TTS is quite flexible in terms of being used to play a game. This is probably why so many of the 20+ Power Grid maps that are available have been set up for use with TTS.
That being said, it can be painfully slow playing Power Grid on TTS. Each player has to keep track of how much money they are spending on fuel and cities and turn that money into the bank, and are also responsible for taking their payouts from the bank. Getting fuel and putting it on your power plants, placing cities for your network, and getting money into and out of the bank can be quite awkward and time consuming. This is why for most experienced players the BSW interface seems to be preferred. Because BSW actually has logic built into it that tracks how Power Grid is played, a Power Grid game can be played on the site in less than an hour (as compared to two to three hours using TTS, depending on the boards in play and the proficiency of the users).
Because of those factors, I'm going to focus the rest of this article on BSW and also on using the Discord client to enable the game players to communicate with one another. I may write another article later which focuses on using TTS.
The most annoying thing about BSW is that there are only five maps online: USA, Germany, France, Italy, and Baden. These are the original five maps that were available in Germany in 2005 or 2006, and apparently none have been added since then. I'm going to attempt to email someone at BSW and see why more maps haven't been added (will be much easier if someone there speaks english). If it's due to licensing reasons I'm not sure what can be done. If it's a matter of someone doing some coding that might be something that could be addressed.
As I mentioned earlier, it is free to register on the BSW site. Here's a link to the site:
BrettSpielWelt Dot De
Here's a link to the page where you can download the BSW client for your computer (I don't know if you can play it without the client, but even if you can, it apparently works better with the client program rather than through a browser window).
BSW Metaspiel page
By the way, BSW does let you play some games as an "unregistered" user, but there are limitations doing this. One limitation is that if two unregistered users are trying to get into the same game on BSW from the same IP address (in other words, the same household) it doesn't work correctly. Since registering is free, I would go ahead and register if you want to give it a try.
A few things I will mention about BSW. They have made a nod to the American, British and other english language users with an english language version of the client. However, only some verbiage has been translated into english. Other things on the site will still pop up in German. I haven't bothered trying to translate them since they don't seem to actually affect the game play. I can tell you that Ausloggen apparently means "Log Out".
When you launch the BSW client and log in, a screen will appear with a pane on the left that has a header of "Game Selection". If you want to initiate a Power Grid game, click on Strategiespiele (Strategy Games) and then scroll down until you find Funkenschlag (the German name for Power Grid) and click on it.
This will show you available servers (these have a dark gray and brown background) and servers already hosting a game (dark gray and blue). Theoretically you could jump into a game some random person started but I have avoided this as I don't want to have to worry about what language the game players are using and, for example, what discord channel they might be using.
There is a neat shortcut to get into a game that was initiated by someone you know and have already made arrangements with to get into their game. In the single line command prompt at the bottom of the client window, if you issue the following command and then hit Enter you should automatically jump into a game that user is in:
/ghook (BSW user name)
For example, since my BSW user name is ChrisMills, the following will pop you into a game I am in (assuming I am in a game):
/ghook ChrisMills
I mentioned a "discord channel" a couple of paragraphs before this. Discord is a website where you can get into an audio channel with people you are playing a game with. It's useful to be able to talk when you have questions, when you need to get someone's attention who has gotten distracted (or possibly nodded off) or where you want to make snarky comments about some of the other players (well, hopefully not).
Here is a link to the Discord site:
Discord Dot Com
And here is the page where you can download the Discord client:
Discord Dot Com Client Download Page
Discord is also free, and it's very useful. I don't think you can use the site without registering.
When someone sends you an invite to a Discord channel and you accept it, that channel shows up in your list of Discord channels and you can jump in and speak to other people on the same channel. As I mentioned earlier, it's quite useful.
You should accept a Discord invite within 24 hours of it being sent or the link will expire.
I think this is actually enough for an introduction to this topic. I am going to mention one annoying thing about Power Grid on BSW and two other things that may bite you in the ass the first time you are playing the game online.
Revisiting BSW, here is the help page (in English) on the site for Funkenschlag/Power Grid:
Funkenschlag (Power Grid) - Online Guide
When it is your turn to fire your power plants in Power Grid, each plant you own comes up with two buttons underneath, one that says Demolish and one that says Fire. You may need to move fuel from one plant to another when this happens in order to fire all your plants. HOWEVER, the only plants that come up with the Fire button automatically lit up are plants that don't require fuel (i.e., wind plants and presumably also the fusion plant). All other plants (basically, most plants) you will specifically have to click on the fire button in order to enable them to burn their fuel. I missed this on one of my first games (even though someone had tried to warn me about it ahead of time) and lost a significant amount of money on that turn.
BTW, the demolish button is for when you are at your plant limit and you buy a new plant, and need to get rid of one of your old plants to make room for it. This ties into one of my other beefs, which I just discovered a couple of days ago. I had two hybrid plants and I had coal on one of the two, the one that I was scrapping. I would have thought the system would automatically have moved my coal over to the other plant I was keeping, but it didn't, it threw the 2 coal I had stored on it away with the plant. I don't know if this works correctly with nonhybrid plants or if you should just move the fuel manually every time to make sure it doesn't get thrown away. I'm going to test this further as I have time and see what I find out, I will update this page when I have done so.
Michelle thinks that if you are buying a new plant that takes the same fuel it will automatically get moved over from a plant you are scrapping, but if you want to move the fuel to an existing plant you own you need to manually move it. I will test this idea when I get a chance.
One other annoying thing is that you can walk back fuel purchases if you change your mind, but there's no way to walk back a city purchase. Once you click on a city, assuming you have enough money to connect it to your network, you HAVE bought it. There is a city build calculator page you can bring up that will let you simulate building cities, but you have to close that page to actually build and when you are really building there is no safety net and no walking it back. You have been warned ...
That's all for now. If you want to get into a teaching game on BSW or one of our regular games (assuming you feel confident enough with the interface to do that) just let me know, and I'll get you into one of the games we are running. If you are interested in getting into any of the games Mike Munson is running (typically every Saturday, although not on weekends where one of the Strategicon conventions is taking place) you can contact him if you have his information, or I can forward an email to him if you send me one.
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