I don't usually write reviews, but after each game of Power Struggle (7 times in the couple of weeks since Essen) I've been more and more impressed with the game, and it's been a massive hit locally. And yet it seems to have mostly been ignored in the post-Essen buzz in favor of titles that were hyped more. So here's some disjoint impressions of my experience with the game so far.

I won't explain the rules: they're not complex, but there's a lot of them, so you're better off just reading the rulebook if that's what you're looking for. Have a look at Tim Harrison's review ( http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/460891) for a rules overview.

Summary:

This is an absolutely fabulous game that has not yet fallen flat on any playing. Everyone we've played it with has liked it a lot, whether they're from the Dominion or Age of Steam part of the gamer spectrum. It's pretty rare for us to play anything except fillers multiple times in a row, but for Power Struggle playing a couple of games in a row seems to now be the norm.

It's a game with a great theme that rewards skilled play, has massive amounts of player interaction, and has just about the right level of luck and uncertainty for me. And better yet, it's a game where those with less skilled seem to be having lots of fun while losing. It even plays very quickly after just a little practice. What's not to like?

More details:

Part of the charm of the game is the theme of office politics. I play mostly with a group of people from work, so a game that allows making snide comments about office politics certainly works much better than a generic medieval eurotheme. And the theme really does support the play: it seems obvious that the game was built around the theme rather than having a "funny" theme slapped on top of some generic resource optimization game.

The basic mode of gameplay is that each player takes one action per turn. There's about a dozen actions to select from (e.g. hire more workers, buy shares, found new departements in the company). Our experience will only last around 10-15 turns, so the number of actions in a game will actually be very small. You need to make each one count, and probably have a good plan from very early on. Sespite there being so few decisions in the game, there's still a lot of depth since there are so many perfectly valid options on every turn.

The game ends when somebody gets 4 VPs. The main way of getting VPs is to reach a certain threshold on one of the 5 scoring tracks (e.g. influence, which you get mainly by having your people on the company board or as the chairman, or corruption which you get by accepting or offering bribes). Additionally you can get one extra VP by achieving a secret goal: each player has a randomly chosen nemesis whom they need to beat on a randomly chosen set of 3 VP tracks.

The BGG description of Power Struggle claims it's an area control game. I'm not sure it really counts as one, but if it does, it's certainly the most devious implementation of the idea I've seen. The basic idea is that players can found new departments in the
6 divisions of The Company, or merge or shuffle around existing departments. At the end of each round the player with the most managers in each division gets to be the new division head, and gains a modest special power.

The sneaky part is that you don't really win the game by controlling the divisions, it's rather that you win the game by *losing* control of the divisions that you usually hold just for a short time. This comes up in a couple of different ways:

First, other players can give you bribes to get the special power away from you. This is usually good for both the briber and the bribee (both will gain steps on the corruption track, the briber gains access to a more powerful version of the original power, and the bribee gets a little bit of money). So you'd usually like to take over the divisions whose special power you don't want, but somebody else does. This ensures that you can bribe somebody else for the powers you really want, and somebody else will be looking to bribe you.

Another way in which it comes up is that the best way to get steps on two of the score tracks is to either resign or get booted out of the position of division head, which will let you retire to either the board of the company (for influence) or become an external consultant (for experience). And really it's a waste of actions to spend an action retiring, you'd much rather just ensure that somebody else feels compelled to spend actions taking over the division instead. But of course you want to control some divisions, so you'll be doing somebody else the same favor elsewhere.

So if you're burnt out on the terms "area control" or "area majority" (I know I am), don't let them scare you. This is a very different take on the idea.

The main concern I had after a couple of plays was that the secret goal mechanism would be unbalanced. Based on those games, it seemed like some of the goals should be a bit easier than others, and being your own nemesis should be easier yet. And in a game where every little bit counts, having a secret goal that can be achieved one turn earlier is actually a huge benefit. Likewise there were concerns that if two people end up as each others' nemeses and have overlapping goals, they've lost.

But it just isn't working out that way, the goals seem to be beautifully balanced in practice even if not on paper. And we've had a 5p game where a pair of players with 2 out of 3 overlapping goals were each other's arch enemies, with what we had previously thought to be the weakest goal sets, and still were 1st and 2nd.

Given the secret goals are well balanced, the main effect is that you usually don't know exactly who is winning, or even how far away from winning somebody is. This is a nice feature, as it keeps the mid game from bogging down in endless analysis of who needs to be blocked from winning. Of course at some point in the end game somebody might need to tip their hand, and if they're close to winning, can expect others to collude to delay the victory, but that isn't the norm. Since I don't really enjoy games of ganging up on the leader, this is a great feature.

The rules are a bit hairy (it's a 16 page rulebook), and you can expect to have some trouble with explaining them the first time around. That said, we seem to be able to explain the rules pretty quickly now after doing it a few times.

Likewise you should expect the first game to be pretty slow as people struggle with all the available options and play inefficiently, and then to speed up as they understand the system. The BGG game description currently suggests 90-120 minutes for a 3 player game, and longer for more players. This hasn't been our experience after the very first game. We can get a 5p game in at under 90 minutes reliably even with some new players in the mix, and the latest 4p game I played was over in an hour.

But other than those couple of issues with the first game, there isn't a lot to complain about. Do yourself a favor and try this twice.

Wow :-). Thanks a lot.

"The sneaky part is that you don't really win the game by controlling the divisions, it's rather that you win the game by *losing* control of the divisions that you usually hold just for a short time. ".

Very good :-)

Yeah, this game sounds brilliant. Unfortunately, it's rather hard to get hold of an English version right now. If you know of a source, geek mail me with suggestions.

Or post here as I'm sure there are a lot of people interested in the english version of the game, me included.

Great review, Juho... I think it very nicely compliments mine, which is obviously more focused on the rules. Well done!

I've played 3 times in the past week since Essen and this is the best game since Agricola.

I didn't finish reading the review before realising something. I saw the "after 7 days" bit and realised that as the game has only been out for about two weeks, the fact that you've logged 7 plays means:
(i) you hate the game but you have far too much time on your hands, are capable of persuading your friends to play a game repeatedly that you all dislike, and you don't have *any* other games to play; or
(ii) you - and your friends - all thing that it's really, really good.

I only dipped my toe into the water that is Power Struggle briefly at Essen, yet it was one of just 5 games that I purchased for myself. So I'm predisposed to think nice thoughts about the game already. But from what you - and others - have been saying, this could be one of a very few really good new games at Essen.

I'm also going to bump it up the list of games to try and play myself in the very near future.

Valley Games have a bunch at BGG con,
Funagain.com will have a bunch in a few weeks.
Enjoy.

Thanks! Won't be at BGG.con, but when Funagain gets a copy in, it shall be mine!

Alas, there's never enough time to even play everything once, let alone having too much time... This is definitely case (ii).

But for other new Essen releases for which I'm in the same ballpark of plays after the same period of time, I think the reasons are more like:

(iii) A lot of people are interested in giving this game a try, and the game works a lot better if someone experienced is involved for the whole game rather than just giving a hit and run rules explanation -> somebody will be playing a lot of this with newbies, and since it's a pretty good game, it might as well be me.
(iv) Everyone is raving about this game on the internet, and I can see the promise, but in practice it just doesn't work. Let's play just one more time to see if it clicks and if the obvious flaws disappear with experience, leaving just the good parts.

That was definitely my experience in our first game last night. For the first half of the game, most of the players (myself included) had this 'Bzuh?' expression on their faces, and I found myself wondering several times whether I was supposed to be having fun yet. But as we started to make connections between the various actions und to plan for several turns in advance, the game started working for us. It still wasn't exactly a fun experience, but I'd like to try this again to apply my new-found knowledge