New Game: Pick and Pack!

Tony and I played this new game that I've just picked up the day before. We had Berkant and Mike as floating audience...heh. Both of us played for the first time, but I thought I had a slight advantage after having self-played (though badly) once before. And off we go...well, Tony was constantly picking up lots of apples, so I fell behind with that. It was about picking up apples in the beginning, and trying to do various actions later in the game. I put a premium on one of my better crates with only 2 trays on it, and put a wholesale on one of Tony's crates that had a tray with 6 apples. Then Tony put two wholesales on two of my crates, leaving me with only one crate left in play. But since Tony blocked one of my premium tiles, that means that this crate would remain open for the rest of the game. Close to the end, I made a strange maneuver to swap one of my 1-apple trays with one of Tony's 2-apple trays utilizing a rush order action. Little did I know then, this would be a game breaker for me, as I won by 1 point! Tony had 13 + 4(.5) + 10 + 14(premium) for 41 points, while I had 5(.5) + 4(.5) + 18(premium) + 15 for 42 points. Nice! Not a bad game, though it does burn the brain just a little. Tony mentioned that he was only looking for me to get fewer apples while I was looking to prevent him from taking certain actions, which was certainly true. So now I'm going to lose the next time...heh.

Power Grid Italy with New Plants!

I picked up the Italy/France map just this day, and played the Italy portion in the evening with Harry and Li Zhen. And we used the new power plants. It's a double expansion game! We played the higher-cost lower three regions, together with the higher resource costs, it should have been a game where money was tight...unfortunately, not so with the efficient power plants! So money was almost never an issue, which kind of took a bit of fun out of the game. But in any case, we proceeded as usual, this time I actually built more houses than Harry sometimes! Initially I was blocked in by both of them, but I rammed north to take a stake there (with enough money to do that...heh).

The power plants were mostly balanced, so we couldn't get a lasting plant early in the game, which is good. Step 3 auctions were kind of lame, though, since we were all trying to bet if the next plant is going to be one of those giant ones. So instead of bidding high for a plant, there was almost no bidding. In the end, I was the only one with 19 capacity while both Harry and Li Zhen had 18 capacity. I had just enough money to build to 19 cities, so I won. Harry had less money than Li Zhen, so Li Zhen got second place. But the trick is, had Li Zhen bought one more plant in the last round to raise his capacity to 19, there was a possibility that he might have won...heh. But for now, I win for the first time in a while.

About the new power plants...I think the way we play them sort of ruins part of the fun. The giant plants that are above 50 messes things up quite a bit. Maybe that's why for a few games now, we had enough capacity to finish the game way before we had enough cities on the board. That slowed the tension by quite a bit. So in the future, we should either play with the old plants or play only the new plants up to 50, like what the rules said...heh.

Final scores:
Li Zhen: 18 capacity and cities, 53 dollars left.
Harry: 18 capacity and cities, 36 dollars left.
Me: 19 capacity and cities, 36 dollars left.