Electrify Review, Four Plays In
I've played Electrify four times now, all of them solo on the beta version over on Board Game Arena, and I still haven't beaten the first scenario. I'm a little better each time, which is the part I keep turning over, because getting better and winning turn out to be two different clocks, and the second one runs slower than I'd like.
When I heard Electrify came from John D. Clair, who also made Space Base, I figured I knew roughly what was waiting in the box. Space Base is a game where a number comes up and a whole row of ships answers, one after another, and the fun is the answering. Electrify has the same love of one thing setting off the next, but there are no dice anywhere in it. Nothing arrives that you didn't set up yourself. If a chain goes off, you built the chain, and if it fizzles, you can usually find the exact card you put in the wrong place. Playing it feels like sitting down with a very patient version of the same designer.
The game is played over twelve rounds. Under your player board you have five sector tiles in a row, each one a different part of running a power business, and the further right a tile sits the stronger it is when you use it. Each round you pick one sector to run. Before you do anything with it you may buy a single industry card, paying with cubes out of your depots, and slot that card onto any of your five sectors. It doesn't have to be the one you picked. Then you charge, which means putting a cube on the chosen sector, a cube on every card sitting on it, and then following the little arrows printed on those cards. An arrow points left, sometimes up or down a slot, and wherever it lands that card gets charged too. If that card has an arrow, the chain goes on, and a good turn can run clean across all five sectors.
Then you discharge, and this is where the actual work happens. Cards let you produce energy cubes, develop them, transmit them, research, or draw more cards. There are seven kinds of energy, running from fossil fuel at the dirty end to solar at the clean end, and developing a cube means spending an action to slide it one depot to the right, into something cleaner and worth more. Transmitting lifts a cube up into the grid, and only cubes in the grid can be spent on the demand cards laid out by the score track. Fill one of those and you score, and the first two you ever fill pay out extra rewards, so which two you choose first shapes the whole game. When all of that is done, the sector you ran gets picked up and put back in the far left column, shoving the others one space to the right. The tile you just used is now the weakest thing you own.
That last rule is the one that gets into your head. Every turn you spend your best sector and hand it back to the bottom, so you can't lean on one thing for long. The game wants you to rotate, to let each part of the machine have its turn at the front, and to arrange your cards so that whatever is strong right now is feeding whatever will be strong next.
Solo play swaps the other players for a scenario card. You're racing to reach a number of energy points by the end of round twelve, and the scenarios come in difficulties from one gear up to four. Bonus stars sit above the round track and each one is worth points at the end, but you only claim them by hitting specific demand cards or challenges, and the round marker eats them as it passes. There's no secret dial choice either, since there's nobody to hide it from. You pick your sector in the open, and a random draw of boost tokens decides whether you get the collaboration bonus or the innovation bonus that turn. So even your choice has a little weather in it.
I think this is why Electrify has stuck with me.
Aristotle has a way of putting this in the Nicomachean Ethics. We become just by doing just things and brave by doing brave things, and excellence of any kind grows out of repetition long before it grows out of understanding. A rulebook can tell you what an arrow does. Running the machine again and again is what teaches you to see the chain before you build it, and that slow education has been happening to me one game at a time.
And there's a small cruelty in it, that the scenario doesn't care how much I've improved. It asks for a number. I can feel myself seeing the chains earlier, buying cards with the whole row in mind, and I'm still short. Aristotle would say that's fine, that the habit matters more than any single result. I'd like to say I fully believe him. Mostly I believe him on the nights I'm not looking at the scenario card.
The cubes themselves are a decent picture of all this. Every cube starts in fossil fuel, the cheapest and dirtiest thing on the board, and the whole game is a slow process of paying to move that same material one step to the right at a time. It's the same cube at the end, only it's been worked on, and it counts for more.
When the last game ended, the round marker was sitting on twelve and my five sectors were still lined up on the screen in the order I'd left them, whatever had been run last tucked back against the left edge. I looked at that row for a while before closing the tab, and somewhere in the middle of looking I was already working out which sector I'd want sitting on the far right next time.
