Power Grid — Rules

Overview

Power Grid is a network-building and auction game for 2–6 players. You buy power plants at auction, purchase the fuel they consume, and build houses into cities on the map. Each round ends with bureaucracy: you earn money for the cities you power, the resource market is refilled, and player order is recomputed. When someone builds into the target number of cities, the game ends and the player who can power the most cities wins (ties broken by remaining money).

For the special rules of each map and its Recharged variant, see the maps page.

Setup

The game is set up automatically. Each player starts with $50 and a supply of houses in their color.

  • The map is divided into regions; only a subset is used (3 regions with 2–3 players, 4 with 4 players, 5 with 5–6 players).
  • 8 power plants form the starting market: 4 in the actual market (available now) and 4 in the future market (visible, but not yet buyable), sorted by number.
  • The remaining plants form a face-down deck, with the Step 3 card placed at the bottom.
  • The resource market starts stocked with coal, oil and garbage; uranium starts scarce.

Each power plant card shows its number (the minimum bid), its fuel type and cost (how many resources it consumes), and how many cities it powers. Plants burn coal (brown), oil (black), garbage (yellow) or uranium (red); hybrid plants accept any mix of coal and oil, and wind plants burn nothing. Each plant can store twice its fuel cost.

The round

Each round has five phases, in order:

  1. Determine player order — the player with the most cities goes first; ties are broken by the highest-numbered power plant. After the first round this is recomputed every round.
  2. Auction power plants — see below.
  3. Buy resources — in reverse player order (last player first), each player buys fuel from the market. The more of a resource is missing, the more expensive it gets; uranium has its own steep price track.
  4. Build — in reverse player order, each player adds houses to cities. Your first city costs $10; each further city costs $10 plus the cheapest connection from your network. In Step 1 each city holds one house; in Step 2 two; in Step 3 three ($10 per slot). You may never build two houses in the same city.
  5. Bureaucracy — you choose which plants to run, spend their fuel, and earn income for the cities you power ($10 for the first, growing with each additional city, capping at $150). The resource market is then refilled (how much depends on the map, the step and the player count), and the power plant market is refreshed.

Power plant auctions

Going around the table from the first player, each player either puts a plant up for auction or passes (a player who passes, or who already bought a plant this round, sits out the rest of the phase).

  • The active player picks a plant from the actual market and opens the bidding at its number or higher.
  • Bidding continues clockwise; each bid must raise the previous one. Once you pass, you're out of that auction.
  • The last remaining bidder pays their bid and takes the plant. A replacement is drawn and the market re-sorted, so the 4 lowest-numbered plants are always available.
  • You may win at most one plant per round. If everyone passes without putting a plant up, the lowest-numbered plant is discarded and the phase restarts.

You may hold at most 3 power plants (4 in a 2-player game). Buying beyond the limit means immediately discarding a plant — and any fuel stored on it that you can't move elsewhere.

With the fast bid option, everyone bids secretly and simultaneously instead: the highest bidder wins but pays only the second-highest bid (plus $1 if the runner-up is later in turn order; ties go to the player earliest in turn order at the second-highest price).

Steps and the end of the game

The game is divided into three steps:

  • Step 2 begins when someone reaches their 7th city (6 with 2 players; 10 with 6 players; this varies on some maps). The lowest-numbered plant is discarded, and cities now accept a second house.
  • Step 3 begins when the Step 3 card is drawn from the deck. The deck is removed, the market shrinks to 6 plants (all buyable), and cities accept a third house.
  • The game ends at the end of the round in which a player builds into the target number of cities — 17 with 3–4 players, 15 with 5, 14 with 6, 21 with 2 (again, some maps differ).

After the final bureaucracy, the player who can power the most cities wins. Ties are broken by remaining money, then by the most cities built.