As I said in my game session of 6/19/2004, this has the marks of a great game. It's beautiful. It's easy to learn, yet difficult to master. It plays in a reasonable amount of time. Most importantly, it's fun. I give it a 9/10 and I'll tell you why.

GAMEPLAY:
The basic premise of the game is to connect cities together with your companies lines and then power as many of those cities as you can. You don't see the lines themselves, but know that they are there by placing a little colored house on any given city to show that you are connected to it.

During each turn, there are five bacic steps. They are easy to remember, because there is nothing complicated about them. For instance, one might ask "How do I get more power plants?", and the answer would be "In the power plant auction phase, silly." Likewise for acquiring resources and connecing cities. The phases are as follows:

1) Determin play order. This is based on who has the most cities connected.
2) Buy power plants at auction. Very simple auction system. Nicer plants have a higher minimum bid. The gameplay forces old crappy plants to exit the game in a few different ways. The 'future market' system allows players to see what's in the 'pipeline' so to speak. No pun intended.
3) Connect cities. Simple: pay cash, connect cities.
4) Buy resources. Just as simple: pay cash, collect resources. The more scarce a resource is, the more it costs.
5) Power your plants and collect cash based on a payout chart, replenish the resources based on a replenishment chart, fiddle with the power plant market, et cetera. All very straight forward.

As in most games you have several choices. You have to balance your desire for cheap connections and efficient powering of cities with your desire to block other players out of certain areas of the map, to force them to make more expensive connections elsewhere. You spend money on 3 different things, so you have to chose wisely there too. Do I forgo a power plant this round so I can expand to one extra city? Do I buy up extra of some resource I don't need to drive the price up? And so on.

A lot of people have expressed concerns with the payout chart. I think it was sufficient.

One of the best things about the game, in my opinion, is that there are several mechanics designed to keep the leader humble. Several important phases go in reverse turn order. There are diminishing returns on the payout chart, so it becomes more and more difficult to turn a profit as you add cities and power them. The person that triggers step 2 (usually the leader) has a distinct disadvantage. et cetera.

QUALITY:
Superb! Beautiful double sided board. One side has Germany, the other has the USA. Typical high quality German style quality. Colorful wood bits. Plastic coated everything (except for the power plant cards). Player aids for everyone. Nice artwork. Use of shapes in addition to color for all the color blind geeks out there. Symbols rather than text for all of those non-German speaking geeks out there.

I think I saw 1 misprint on the German board. One of the cities didn't have the 10/15/20 costs printed on it. And, as usual, one or more of your wooden pieces may be a 'runt' piece.

PRICE:
It costs about what you'd expect to pay for a nice, high quality game. ~40 USD.

DURATION:
About 30-45 mins per player plus 15-30 minutes for covering the rules with new players at the beginning. Not too long. Could stand to be a little quicker, but not many people will mind the play time, given the experience as a whole.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION:
One costly mistake. Each turn has what I'll call 'phases.' There are 5 of them. Phases are repeated in order every turn for the entire game. The game has what I'll call 'steps.' Steps last for several turns, alter the rules slightly, and are triggered by gameplay. This all sounds very non-confusing, right? Now imagine that the rules use those two words interchangably. Ok, it's not that bad, but the 'step 3' card says 'phase 3' for instance. Over all it was a decent translation.

OVERALL:
This game is definately a keeper. I'm not even slightly suprised that it shot into the top 20 on the Geek and is in the process of doing the same on the Internet top 100 games list.