When comparing Power Grid vs Kingdom Builder, the Slant community recommends Power Grid for most people. In the question“What are the best strategy board games?” Power Grid is ranked 7th while Kingdom Builder is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Power Grid is:
The concepts are pretty easy to grab a hold of (buy power plants, connect different cities together, buy resources for your power plants, then make money and repeat). Each step has strategy involved with it - when you buy power plants you want to diversify from others as resources more in demand cost more - when connecting cities you are looking at pricing but also blocking other players off - you can buy extra resources to boost the price on other players, or buy the bare minimum for that turn etc etc.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to understand but still allows for good micromanagement/strategy
The concepts are pretty easy to grab a hold of (buy power plants, connect different cities together, buy resources for your power plants, then make money and repeat). Each step has strategy involved with it - when you buy power plants you want to diversify from others as resources more in demand cost more - when connecting cities you are looking at pricing but also blocking other players off - you can buy extra resources to boost the price on other players, or buy the bare minimum for that turn etc etc.
Pro It's hard for 1 player to hold onto the lead
You know those games where one player has a great start, and nobody can even dream of catching up? That doesn't happen in Power Grid. It balances itself out - the player currently winning goes first when buying power plants (they get only the current selection), and they build new cities last (worst selection) and pay the most for raw materials.
While the game punishes (at least in a way) the leading player, it helps to balance games and make them more fun overall. In addition, you can strategically not build more cities and hold yourself back if you need the advantage.
Pro Very little randomness
There is almost no randomness involved in the game, making achieving mastery of the game about understanding your opponents' plans and working around them.
Pro Starts simple and then grows more complex over time
At the beginning of the game, you'll be pretty limited to placing your settlements based on the terrain cards you draw. At this stage it's very simple - draw a desert card, place a settlement on a desert tile. However, after a few turns, the coverage of your settlements on the board will allow for more strategic plays. You'll have more options for placing adjacent settlements and expanding towards key points on the map like castles that award bonus gold.
Pro Random win conditions encourage you to adjust your strategy every game
There are builder cards that represent various win conditions, and before each game, three are chosen at random. These cards give you specific goals to work for when building your kingdom, and award gold each time you successfully meet one of their conditions. For example, the fisherman card awards one gold for each settlement you place next to a body of water. The knight card gives you one gold for each settlement you have in a horizontal line at the end of the game. There are ten of these total, and three in play per gaming session, meaning each time you play you will be trying to build your kingdom in new ways.
Pro The game board allows for vast replayability
You can set up a unique board, so the terrain on which you're building your kingdom will be different every time you play. In total, there are eight interlocking game board pieces with varying amounts of mountains, lakes, forests, deserts, etc. At the start of the game, you choose four of these pieces and then place them together in a 2x2 grid layout. Each piece not only has two sides to choose from, but they can also be rotated however you wish.
Pro Great for quick gaming sessions
Setup is minimal and the game itself only takes about 45 minutes to play from start to finish.
Pro Easy to understand
The rules are very simple and easy to grasp, allowing you to jump right into the game with very minimal instruction.
Before the game begins, three cards are randomly selected from the builder deck. These builder cards give you goals to work for such as building the most settlements in a forest, next to a body of water, or in a horizontal row. For each one of these conditions met, you earn gold.
Each turn, you place three settlements on the game board. Where you can place your settlements is determined by a randomly drawn terrain card. For example, if you draw the desert card on your turn, your settlements may be placed on a desert tile anywhere on the map. The only rule is all settlements must be placed adjacent to other settlements.
There are also castles on the map that award bonus gold when you are able to build a settlement adjacent to one. These come into play as your kingdom begins to expand and you have more options for placing settlements.
At the end of the game, the gold is tallied up based on win conditions satisfied, and the player with the most gold wins.
Cons
Con No room for creativity
Once you fall behind, there aren't many ways to catch up. Virtually everything can be calculated (only power plants are random), meaning there is little surprise. Once you get started, you keep trucking along the same path until somebody wins.
Con A little too luck based
Where you can place your settlements each turn relies on which terrain card you draw. For example if you keep getting forest cards, you will have to continually build in forests which is very limiting and makes it hard to expand out to other areas of the map or satisfy the various win conditions.
Con A rough start can be overly punishing
The game usually lasts only about 10 rounds, so if you get some unlucky terrain card draws early in the game, it makes recovering in the endgame almost impossible. For example, you may want to build settlements around a castle for bonus points, but that castle is in a desert and you keep drawing forest cards. There's simply not enough rounds to outplay the luck of the draw.