Naturelich Games

It has been a while - hasn't it?! There are some great news to my private life (owner of a house, married to my great wife and awaiting a daugther in the next two weeks). That's why I was pretty silent on my blog. Nevermind...

Yesterday my wife and I were playing the Funkenschlag - EnBW Edition for the very first time. It was the first time my wife ever played a Funkenschlag game. I had recently acquired the EnBW edition from ebay.de. We decided to play the Baden-Württemberg map. The back of the rules booklet contains a little table containing all the important pieces of information for experienced Funkenschlag players, e.g. with 2 players one needs to be using three sections of the map. I had not played the original game or any of it's expansions in years. Compared to games like Agricola, Railroad Tycoon or Khronos, the complexity of Funkenschlag is actually okay. I had always remembered Funkenschlag to be a little bit more complex, but it actually is not.
My wife understood the rules quickly and we started at a fast pace. She acquired two power plants that allowed her to power 4 cities. My strategy was to got for the first environment-friendly power plant and take my time. I was able to expand slowly but steadily. My wife had too much power in her power plants early in the game and therefore burned some of the coal inefficiently.

In the second phase of the game I was able to get ahead in terms of the overall capacity of my power plants. My wife fell a little bit behind. This was not her fault but caused by some unlucky card draws. I was able to defend the lead in terms of capacity and my wife managed to get hold of all the coal and oil in the game. I was still relying on waste and nuclear power plants and had to bring down power production in order to preseve my coal inventory. The game slowed down a little bit and we were mainly waiting for the third phase to start.

Once the card to initiate the third phase of the game was there, I was able to get to 21 power plants and win the game quite easily - as I was ahead on capacity.

My wife liked the game and we decided to play again in the future...

Maybe I will even write about it...