Power Grid Boardgame 4+

Crashes and lost games

What follows are some thoughts I put together while trying out the game before (spoiler alert) I asked for a refund.

Async game modes are available, as well as AI and Pass’n’play presumably. The app does capture the look and feel of the physical game with fonts and green-ness of everything.

I’ve played it so I’ll work it out, but if you’re new to it I think you’ll need to read the rules or watch a video to help you get into the game. The tutorial is just a UI guide.

Screens just flash up, and you don’t really know what round/phase of the turn you are in. I moved a couple of windows and then pressed the help (it’s in English in the game) then it crashed.

This will be a bit intimidating if you haven’t played it before. I’ve played a few rounds. If you’ve never played it before you’re going to find it very frustrating.
And if you have played it before you will also find it frustrating. It let me place a third city I couldn’t afford, so I pressed a red ❌ to undo, but it doesn’t seem to allow me to start again. I then tried a ? and naturally it crashed again.
Now I’ve been playing it for 10 minutes against the AI, will it allow me to reload my game or have I been let down again.
Of course my game has gone so that was a waste of time.

Maybe in 3 months they’ll fix the crashes and have a good solo player experience. There weren’t any games in the online lobbies. They’ve gone for the right look and feel.

It looks a lot more feature rich than other games I’ve played in the past, and I think the achievements are geared to encourage you to try more things. There’s a help page that outlines how to play the game and some tactics to consider (try not to be the first player to much)
And more information on the different features of the maps.

It needs a little pop up to tell you which stage of the round is happening - power plants, fuel, houses, power, bureaucracy. Without that it’s not so easy to know where you are.

The shame of it is that it’s probably nearly there, but online games are going to be hard to find if my experience is replicated elsewhere, because no one will be there to play it online because they’ll have given up like I have.

Developer Response ,

Hi Diesel Pioneer,

thank you very much for your detailed review.

If you tap and hold the menu button at the bottom right, you can see at any time which level and phase the game is in.

The crashes when tapping on a question mark have been fixed with today's update.

Unfortunately I couldn't reproduce your problem with the ❌. All cities are always removed for me. Alternatively, you can remove a house by tapping the city again. Please try it again.

According to your advice, the game will now be saved continuously. If the app crashes again, you can restart it with your last action. Until now, saving was only done when exiting the game via the settings menu.

I hope that the improvements will now increase the number of online games and that you will give the app another chance.