Author: Raymond

You know, after forty years of working with electrical systems, I thought I understood power pretty well. Then my grandson Jake introduced me to Power Grid about four years ago, and I figured – hey, this should be right up my alley, right? Well, turns out knowing how electricity works in real life doesn’t help much when you’re trying to build a power network on a board game map. Especially when that map happens to be Russia or Japan.

I’ll be honest, when Jake first pulled out the base Power Grid game, I was skeptical. Looked complicated, lots of pieces, thick rulebook – the kind of game that would’ve scared me off when I first started playing modern board games with my grandkids. But Jake was patient (bless him), walked me through it step by step, and before I knew it I was hooked. There’s something deeply satisfying about building up your power network, buying plants, managing resources. Reminded me of planning electrical jobs, actually – you need to think ahead, budget your materials, anticipate problems.

But then Jake brought over these expansion maps. Russia and Japan, he said, totally different experience. I thought, how different could they be? Same basic game, just different geography, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. These maps don’t just change the scenery – they completely flip the script on everything you think you know about Power Grid strategy.

My first game on the Russia map was… well, let’s just say it was educational. And by educational, I mean I got absolutely crushed. See, I approached it like the standard USA map, figuring I’d gradually expand my network, take my time, make careful decisions. That approach works fine on the regular board. On Russia? It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

The thing about Russia is how the regions are set up. You’ve got these massive areas connected by just a few key cities, and if you don’t move fast enough to secure your territory, you’ll find yourself completely locked out. It’s like… imagine you’re wiring a house, but someone else can come along and block off entire sections of the house from you. Permanently. That’s what happens if you hesitate on the Russia map.

I learned this the hard way during a game with Jake and his friend Alex about two years ago. I was being my usual cautious self, thinking through every move carefully, when Alex swooped in and claimed this huge region I’d been eyeing. Just like that, my expansion plans were shot. I spent the rest of the game cramped into this tiny corner while Alex controlled what felt like half of Russia. Not a fun experience, let me tell you.

The Japan map is a whole different kind of challenge. Where Russia punishes indecision, Japan punishes poor planning. See, on Japan, cities get more expensive as you build more of them. Sounds simple enough, until you realize how drastically this changes your money management. Every connection becomes a major financial decision instead of just another expansion move.

Carol watched me play Japan once and said I looked more stressed than when I’m doing our taxes. She wasn’t wrong. You have to think so far ahead on that map – not just where you want to build next, but where you want to build five moves from now, and how much money you’ll need for each step. My electrician brain kept trying to apply real-world logic (shorter connections should be cheaper, right?), but the game has its own brutal mathematics.

I remember one game where I had everything planned out perfectly – or so I thought. Had my power plants, had my fuel, knew exactly where I wanted to expand. Problem was, I hadn’t properly calculated the escalating connection costs. Ran out of money halfway through my expansion and had to watch helplessly as Jake built around me. Felt like running out of wire in the middle of a job, except worse because I should’ve seen it coming.

Jake taught me a trick that completely changed how I approach the Japan map. Instead of planning forward (where should I build next?), you plan backward. Start with where you want to be at the end of the game, then work backwards to figure out the most efficient path to get there. It’s counterintuitive – at least it was for me – but it works. Sort of like mapping out an electrical system from the panel backward to each outlet.

Both maps also mess with the power plant market in ways that caught me off guard. On the regular board, you can sometimes get away with less-than-perfect plants if your positioning is good. These expansion maps don’t give you that luxury. Every inefficiency gets magnified because you’re operating under tighter constraints.

The fuel situation gets tricky too. Russia’s regional setup means you can control great territory but still struggle to get the fuel you need to actually run your plants. Happened to me more than once – sitting there with a beautiful network and expensive power plants, but all the coal I needed was locked up in regions I couldn’t reach affordably. It’s frustrating in a way that makes you want to flip the table, except you can’t because your grandson spent his allowance money on this expansion and he’s having a great time watching you struggle.

What really gets me about these maps is how they punish the kind of flexible, adaptable strategy that works well in other games I play with the grandkids. In Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne, you can often change direction mid-game if you spot a better opportunity. Russia and Japan force you to commit harder to your chosen path because switching strategies mid-game is so expensive.

This makes reading other players crucial in ways I’m still learning. At my age, picking up on subtle cues and predicting what teenagers are going to do isn’t exactly my strong suit. But these maps force you to anticipate other players’ moves earlier and more accurately than the base game. Jake’s gotten pretty good at the poker face, but I’ve learned to watch his buying patterns instead of his expressions.

The stress level is definitely higher on these maps too. I’ve seen Jake get genuinely frustrated when he realizes he’s painted himself into a corner – and Jake’s usually pretty calm about board games. There’s something about these expansion maps that creates more tension because mistakes are less forgiving. You can’t just shrug off a bad turn and catch up later like you might on other boards.

I’ve made every mistake possible on these maps, trust me. Tried to control entire regions that looked powerful but weren’t actually profitable. Focused too much on short-term gains and ignored long-term positioning. Underestimated connection costs and ran out of money at crucial moments. Each failure taught me something new, though – sometimes painful lessons, but valuable ones.

My advice to other grandparents trying to keep up with their grandkids on these challenging maps? Don’t be afraid to fail spectacularly. Seriously. I learned more from my worst defeats than from accidentally stumbling into victories. Let your usual strategies fail completely, then figure out why they didn’t work. It’s the only way to develop the kind of respect these maps demand.

These expansion maps have made me a better Power Grid player overall, even when we go back to the standard USA board. They’ve taught me to think more systematically about expansion timing, resource management, and long-term planning. Skills that translate to other games too, actually. Plus, there’s something satisfying about holding your own against teenagers on some of the most challenging board game maps ever designed. Even if it did take me about twenty games to stop embarrassing myself completely.

You know, I’ve been playing board games with my grandkids for seven years now, and I thought I’d seen everything. Simple family games, cooperative adventures, even some of those heavier strategy games the kids keep wanting to try. But nothing – and I mean nothing – prepared me for Kingdom Death Monster’s Dragon King expansion. This thing nearly made me throw in the towel on gaming altogether.

My grandson Jake, he’s sixteen now and way smarter about these complicated games than I’ll ever be, he brought this expansion over about six months ago. “Grandpa, you’ve got to try this boss fight,” he says. “It’s totally different from the regular monsters.” I figured, how hard could it be? We’d already muddled through the base game a few times, lost plenty of survivors to various nasty creatures, but we were getting the hang of it.

Boy, was I wrong about this one.

The first time we set up to face the Dragon King, I approached it like any other monster encounter. Same gear loadout we’d been using successfully against the White Lions, same basic strategy of hitting hard and fast. Within maybe twenty minutes of actual gameplay, our entire settlement was basically toast. The dragon’s breath weapon – this massive area attack – wiped out three of our four survivors in one shot. Jake just looked at me and said, “Yeah, that’s what happened to me the first time too.”

That’s when I realized this wasn’t just another monster to fight. This was a completely different kind of puzzle that required rethinking everything we thought we knew about the game. And at sixty-eight years old, let me tell you, learning new systems doesn’t come as naturally as it used to.

The altitude mechanics alone nearly broke my brain. See, most of the monsters in Kingdom Death Monster stay on the ground where you can reach them with swords and spears. Makes sense, right? But this dragon flies around, changing elevation throughout the fight, and suddenly half your attacks can’t even reach it. I spent probably three different game sessions just trying to understand when the thing would come down low enough for us to actually hurt it.

Jake helped me work through the patterns – kids are so good at spotting these things – and we started tracking how the dragon’s flight patterns worked. Turns out it’s not random at all. The dragon uses altitude like a resource, staying high when it wants to blast us with fire, coming down when it needs to make specific attacks. Once I understood that, I could start planning around it instead of just reacting.

But here’s what really frustrated me initially: gear selection works completely backwards from every other fight in the game. Usually, you want your survivors loaded up with the biggest weapons and highest damage potential you can manage. Against the Dragon King, that approach gets you killed fast. We had to completely rebuild our survivors with heat-resistant armor and mobility gear instead of pure attack power. It felt like learning a different game entirely.

The heat mechanics – oh man, don’t get me started on those. There’s this whole system where your survivors start overheating from the dragon’s fire attacks, and if you don’t manage it properly, they start taking automatic damage every turn. I watched one of our best survivors literally cook to death inside his own armor because I didn’t understand how the heat buildup worked. Carol walked by during that game session and asked why I was getting so frustrated with “just a board game.” Try explaining that you’ve spent three hours building up a character only to lose them to game mechanics you didn’t fully grasp.

The positioning requirements are unlike anything else in the game too. Most monsters, you can kind of cluster your survivors together and support each other. The Dragon King’s breath weapon punishes that approach ruthlessly. Jake and I had to develop this diamond formation strategy where our survivors stayed spread out but could still coordinate attacks when the dragon descended. It took us probably six different attempts to get the spacing right.

What really got to me was how much advance planning this expansion requires. We’d been playing the main campaign pretty casually, making decisions based on immediate needs and opportunities. But preparing for the Dragon King means you need to start planning at least three or four game sessions in advance. Specific innovations you have to research, particular weapon types you need to develop, armor combinations that are only useful for this one fight. It’s like the entire campaign becomes about preparing for this single encounter.

I remember complaining to my friend Bob at church about how complicated this one expansion was making the whole game. He just laughed and said, “Raymond, you’ve been telling me for months how much you enjoy learning new games with your grandkids. Sounds like this one’s just giving you more to learn.” He wasn’t wrong, but man, some days I felt like my brain was too old for this level of complexity.

The resource management aspect nearly killed me. See, every resource you spend preparing for the Dragon King is a resource you can’t spend on general settlement improvements. But if you don’t make those preparations, you lose everything anyway when the dragon shows up. It’s this horrible catch-22 that forces you to basically gamble your entire settlement’s future on one fight.

Jake and I probably restarted our campaign four different times because I kept making resource allocation mistakes. Too much spent on regular development, not enough on dragon-specific preparation. Or the opposite – so focused on the Dragon King that our settlement couldn’t handle regular monster encounters leading up to it. Finding that balance took more trial and error than I care to admit.

The timing of when you actually face the dragon matters enormously too. We learned this the hard way when I got impatient during our third campaign and decided to rush the encounter. Our survivors weren’t ready, our settlement lacked crucial innovations, and we got absolutely demolished. The next campaign, we waited too long and missed some optimal preparation windows. It’s like threading a needle – everything has to line up just right.

But you know what? Once we finally beat it – and it took us probably eight different attempts across multiple campaigns – I felt this incredible sense of accomplishment that I hadn’t experienced with any other board game. Not just because we’d won, but because I’d genuinely learned and mastered something complex and challenging. At my age, that feeling doesn’t come around as often as it used to.

The Dragon King taught me that some board games aren’t just entertainment – they’re genuine learning experiences that push your analytical thinking in ways you don’t expect. Every decision from the very beginning of the campaign has to consider how it impacts your eventual dragon preparation. It’s strategic planning on a level I’d never encountered in a board game before.

Jake’s already talking about trying some of the other nemesis monster expansions, and honestly, I’m both excited and terrified. If they’re anything like the Dragon King, I’m in for more nights of frustrated rules-reading and campaign restarts. But I’ve also discovered there’s something deeply satisfying about tackling challenges that initially seem impossible and gradually working your way to mastery. Even at sixty-eight, apparently I can still learn new tricks.

You know what’s humbling? Getting absolutely destroyed at washers by your own grandson at the family reunion three summers ago. There I was, 65 years old, figured I knew how to toss a metal disc into a hole twenty feet away – I mean, how hard could it be, right? Well, little Tommy just casually walked up, barely glanced at the target, and started dropping washers like he had some kind of GPS system built into his arm. Meanwhile, I’m throwing these wild shots that are landing everywhere except where I want them. Carol was trying not to laugh, but I could tell she was enjoying watching me get taken down a peg by a kid who still needs a booster seat at restaurants.

That embarrassing afternoon sent me on what Carol calls my “washer obsession phase.” Spent the next few months figuring out what I was doing wrong and why some people make this game look effortless while others – namely me – look like they’re trying to throw with their feet. Turns out there’s a whole lot more to washers than just chucking metal discs and hoping for the best.

Most folks approach this game the same way I did initially – grip it tight, throw it hard, pray it lands somewhere useful. But after months of practice in our backyard (much to our neighbor’s amusement), I’ve learned that good washer throwing is less about strength and more about understanding what you’re actually trying to do with that little metal disc.

The grip thing was my first breakthrough. I was squeezing those washers like I was trying to juice them, which made my whole hand shake by the time I released. Then I’d overcorrect and hold them so loose they’d slip out sideways. Found my sweet spot when Tommy told me to hold it “like you’re holding a cookie you don’t want to break but also don’t want to drop.” Kid’s got a way with analogies, I’ll give him that. The washer should feel secure in your fingers without making your knuckles turn white.

Release point – now that’s where I was really messing up. First few weeks, I was letting go too early and sending washers sailing clear over the target box like I was trying to reach the next county. Then I’d compensate by holding on too long, and they’d hit the ground about ten feet in front of me. Took me forever to realize I needed to stop thinking about “throwing” and start thinking about “delivering” the washer to its destination.

Here’s something that completely changed my game, and I wish someone had told me this from the start – your arm doesn’t stop working once that washer leaves your hand. Used to be, I’d release and immediately drop my arm like I was done. Wrong approach entirely. Your throwing motion should continue all the way through, pointing toward where you want that washer to land. It’s like bowling, in a way – the follow-through is what keeps everything consistent.

Distance control nearly drove me crazy for the first month. Regulation distance is 21 feet, but conditions change everything. Windy day? Washers fly different. Humid afternoon? They seem heavier. Playing on grass versus dirt? Completely different game. I started throwing a few practice rounds at the beginning of every session, not trying to score points but just getting a feel for how the washers were behaving that particular day.

The trajectory revelation came when I was watching some guys play at a church picnic. Most people, including me, were throwing these high arcing tosses like we were lobbing grenades. But the good players? They were throwing flatter, more controlled shots. Started experimenting with a lower trajectory – not line drives, but not rainbow throws either. More like skipping stones, but with just enough lift to clear the distance. Way more predictable.

Nobody talks about bounce, but it matters more than you’d think. Hard-packed dirt, those washers might skip once and settle down. Soft grass, they stick pretty much where they first hit. Started paying attention to the playing surface before each game, looking for spots that might affect how my washers behave when they land.

Weight shift was another game-changer. Used to plant both feet like I was rooted to the ground and throw everything with just my arm. Now I shift my weight from back foot to front foot during the throw – creates this smooth, flowing motion that adds power without requiring me to muscle it. Plus it helps with consistency, which at my age is way more important than trying to throw harder than everyone else.

Learning to really look at the target area helped too. Instead of just aiming for the general area around the hole, I started identifying specific landing zones. Where would a washer need to hit to slide naturally toward the hole? Where could it land and still score even if it bounced funny? This kind of thinking turned my random tosses into actual strategy.

Mental game is huge, especially when you’re playing with family and there’s good-natured trash talk happening. Used to let one bad throw ruin the next three. Now each throw is its own thing – bad shot happens, fine, that one’s over. The next washer doesn’t care what the previous one did.

Practice drills made the biggest difference. Instead of just playing games all the time, I’d set up targets at different distances and work on accuracy. Twenty minutes of focused practice beats two hours of casual throwing every single time. Even practiced with my left hand occasionally, which sounds crazy but actually helped me understand my regular technique better.

Started paying attention to environmental stuff too – wind direction, where the sun is, whether there are distractions around. These things don’t control the outcome, but being aware helps you adjust. Like if the wind’s coming from the right, I’ll aim slightly left to compensate.

Strategy took me way too long to figure out. Always went for the hole shot, thinking that three-pointer was always the best choice. But sometimes you’re better off throwing washers to block your opponent or set up your next throw. The best toss isn’t always the one that scores the most points right away.

What really matters is consistency over spectacular shots. I’d rather land eight out of ten washers in the scoring area than nail two perfect hole shots and whiff completely on the other eight. Building a reliable technique that works most of the time beats trying to be a hero with every throw.

These days, when we have family gatherings, I hold my own pretty well against Tommy – though he’s 15 now and has gotten even better, the little show-off. But I’m not embarrassing myself anymore, and that’s what counts. Carol jokes that I’ve turned washer throwing into a science project, but hey, it worked. Sometimes us older folks just need to approach things a bit more methodically than the kids who seem to figure everything out by instinct.

You know, at my age you’d think I’d learned not to judge things too quickly, but apparently old habits die hard. When Data and Destiny came out for Android Netrunner, I took one look at those mini-factions and thought, “Great, more complicated stuff to confuse an old electrician.” Boy, was I wrong about that one.

My grandson Jake had been trying to get me into Netrunner for months. He’s sixteen now and way sharper than his old grandpa when it comes to these modern games, but I’d been sticking to the basic corporations I understood – you know, the straightforward ones where you install ice, protect agendas, score points. Simple enough for a guy whose brain moves a little slower than it used to.

Then last month we had our regular Tuesday game session, and Jake brought over this Data and Destiny expansion I’d been ignoring. “Come on, Grandpa Ray,” he says, “let’s try something different.” I figured I’d humor him, maybe play one quick game before going back to something I actually understood.

Well, that kid absolutely demolished me. I mean, it wasn’t even close. He was using this NBN faction called Controlling the Message, and I swear he was getting credits every time I breathed wrong. By the end of the game I was broke, tagged six ways from Sunday, and wondering what the heck had just happened to me.

That’s when I realized I’d been treating this expansion like it was just more of the same, when really it changed everything about how these factions work. See, I’m used to learning new board games where the basic mechanics stay consistent – you just get new pieces or maybe a new board. But these mini-factions? They don’t play by the same rules as the regular ones at all.

Take that Controlling the Message identity that Jake used to school me. First time I tried playing it myself, I kept doing what I always do – install agenda, advance it twice, score it. Except that’s completely wrong for this faction. This thing wants you to interact with the runner, not hide from them. Every time they make a run, you get opportunities to trace them. When those traces work, you get credits and tags. Those credits buy better ice and more traces. It’s like this snowball effect that I totally missed the first time around.

I spent a whole afternoon re-reading the rules and watching some videos online – yeah, this 68-year-old grandpa can learn new tricks when he needs to. What I figured out is you actually want the runner to make runs early in the game. Sounds backwards, right? But every failed run makes you stronger if you’re playing it right.

The math works out differently too. With regular NBN, I needed maybe twenty credits saved up to score an agenda behind decent ice. With Controlling the Message, if I’d been landing those traces consistently, I could do the same thing with half that. That’s huge when you’re trying to keep up with some teenager who’s been playing this game since he could hold cards.

I learned this lesson the hard way during a game night at our local hobby shop – yeah, they have board game nights for us older folks too. I was playing against this other retired guy who seemed to know what he was doing, and he kept making these aggressive runs that looked reckless to me. I thought he was just being impatient, trying to pressure my economy before I could set up properly.

Turns out he understood something I didn’t back then. Every one of those failed runs was making me richer and him poorer, and by the middle of the game I had more credits than I knew what to do with while he was scrambling just to make basic runs. That’s when it clicked for me – this isn’t about protecting your stuff early on, it’s about encouraging interaction so you can profit from it.

The trick is knowing when to switch gears. Early game, you want those traces happening. Install cards that force traces, use ice that starts traces, build up that economic advantage. Middle game, you use that advantage to control the board and create scoring opportunities. Late game, you maintain pressure through tag punishment while scoring out your agendas.

Now Spark Agency, that’s another beast entirely. I probably wasted two months trying to make it work like a fast advance deck – you know, score agendas quickly before the runner can stop you. Terrible results every time. Carol kept asking why I was getting so frustrated with “that computer game” as she calls it.

Spark doesn’t want to fast advance anything. It wants to spam advertisements while building up an unbreakable scoring server. The genius of it – and I use that word carefully because I’m not one to throw around praise lightly – is how it makes normally mediocre cards actually useful.

Cards like Commercial Bankers Group that I’d never bothered with before? Amazing in Spark. Adonis Campaign? Even better. Every advertisement becomes this double threat – it makes you money and it might be hiding an agenda. The runner can’t ignore your stuff because they might miss agendas, but running everything bleeds them dry.

My breakthrough with Spark came when I started thinking about how many advertisements I could keep running at once. Not just the credits they generated, but the psychological pressure. Picture this – you’ve got six cards installed across three different servers. Three are real advertisements making you money and dealing damage to the runner. Three might be bluffs hiding agendas or just more economy.

The runner’s stuck with an impossible choice – run everything and go broke, or let potential agendas score while taking steady damage from the real ads. It’s like being an electrician dealing with a panel where half the breakers are mislabeled. You’ve got to check everything, but every check costs you time and money.

That damage adds up faster than most people expect too. One point here, one point there – doesn’t seem like much until suddenly the runner’s dead and they never saw it coming. I’ve actually won games where the runner died just from advertisement damage, without me using any ice or damage cards at all.

Playing against Spark requires juggling economy, damage prevention, and pressure across multiple threats at once. Most people can’t keep all those balls in the air, which creates scoring opportunities for patient players like me – and at my age, patience is about the only advantage I’ve got left.

On the runner side, Data and Destiny introduces stuff that threw me for a loop completely. Apex doesn’t run like any other runner in the game. When I first tried it, I kept installing programs and losing them because of that weird facedown card requirement. Frustrating doesn’t begin to cover how I felt.

The lightbulb moment came when I stopped trying to build a normal setup. Apex doesn’t want normal programs and normal economy. It wants an engine that turns installed cards into temporary advantages. Those facedown cards aren’t just fodder for installing programs – they’re fuel for Apocalypse runs and other unique tricks.

Apocalypse deserves special mention because it creates game states that don’t exist anywhere else in Netrunner. When you pull it off successfully, it resets the board in your favor while giving you massive tempo advantages. But timing is everything, and at my age timing isn’t always my strong suit.

I’ve found the sweet spot usually happens when the corporation has invested heavily in board development but hasn’t locked down their scoring yet. Multiple servers with ice, several unrezzed assets, maybe an agenda or two scored. That’s when Apocalypse generates maximum value by destroying their investment while leaving you positioned to take advantage.

Then there’s Sunny, whose credit-based approach seemed straightforward until I realized her economic needs are completely different. Regular runners can operate fine on ten to fifteen credits most of the game. Sunny needs twenty to thirty credits to work optimally, but once her engine gets going, she can generate and maintain those totals more easily than other runners.

The link economy creates interesting decisions too. Traces become less scary, but that safety requires significant upfront investment in link generation. It’s a different risk calculation that changes how you evaluate both ice and corporate strategies.

After months of playing with these factions – and getting beaten by my grandson more times than I care to admit – I can say they’ve actually improved my overall Netrunner skills. Understanding their unique approaches helped me see strategic possibilities I’d been missing in other factions too.

That’s what good game design looks like to me. When expansions don’t just add new cards, but add new ways of thinking about the game’s core systems. Data and Destiny rewards players who embrace its innovations rather than fighting them. Each faction demands specific approaches that feel strange at first but become incredibly powerful once you master them.

I may be 68 and my brain may not work as fast as it used to, but I can still learn new tricks when a game is designed this well. And hey, it gives me something to challenge Jake with during our Tuesday game sessions – even if he still wins more often than not.