This could be subtitled "Woohoo! It wasn't me who forgot a rule this time." There were six of us this week and Mark K had brought his copy of Power Grid plus the France / Italy expansion with him, resulting in Andrew and Nicky being very keen to persuade us to play this. We didn't need much persuading and opted for the France map.

With there being six of us, we blocked off the South East corner of France and we dove straight in, once Mark K had given Guy and me a reminder of how to play. We soon got to the point where we thought it was going to be hard for someone to get to seven cities to trigger the second phase and looked through the expansion rules to see whether we'd been wrong to block off a region on this map - but nothing suggested we'd done anything wrong. Seeing that we could theoretically get to a position where no-one could get to seven cities, we decided to "house-rule" that six cities would trigger phase two.

This turned out to be very close with five of us powering at least 14 cities on the final turn. Nige had kept cash back to link to and power a 15th city and he was concerned about Guy and Mark K's ability to overtake him (which Guy couldn't as he only had capacity to power 14 cities). However, it was Andrew who managed also to power 15 cities and retain sufficient elektros to take the win. Mark K, Guy and I were left on 14 powered cities.

Great game but the phase two issue seemed troubling. Looking at the base game rules after the session, however, I found it pretty easy to spot what all regular Power Grid players are screaming right about now. IN THE SIX PLAYER GAME, PHASE TWO STARTS WHEN A PLAYER CONNECTS TO SIX CITIES, NOT SEVEN. Oh well, never mind. At least our instincts were right with our unnecessary house rule.