How to Run Bureaucracy in Power Grid

Bureaucracy is the quiet phase at the end of each round. Nobody bids, nobody builds. But it is where the money comes in, where fuel prices are set for next round, and where the plant market moves. A table that runs it loosely ends up playing a different, easier game without knowing it.

This lesson walks the phase in order, the way a banker would run it. It follows the current Recharged rulebook.

Job 1: get paid

Starting with the player in first place, each player decides which plants to run and how many of their cities to power.

• Pick your plants. You do not have to run every plant. A plant runs once, on exactly the fuel it shows.
• Burn the fuel. Spent fuel goes into the general supply beside the market. Never put it back on the market spaces.
• Count powered cities. You power the smaller of two numbers: cities your running plants can supply, and cities you own. Extra power is lost.
• Collect. The payout card turns powered cities into Elektro. Powering no cities still pays 10.

Here is the payout card in full, so you can see its shape:

Each extra city pays a little less than the one before. The payout card lesson in Level 1 shows what that curve means for your spending.

On the USA side, burned coal goes to the coal reserve space beside the market instead of the general supply.

Job 2: refill the resource market

The refill card for your player count has three columns, one per step. Find the column for the current step and add that many of each fuel from the supply.

Two rules make this work:

1. Fill from the expensive end. Start at the most expensive space that has an empty slot, and work down toward the cheap end. Coal, oil, and garbage spaces hold three markers each. Uranium spaces hold one.
2. The supply is the limit. If the supply is short, add only what is there. Fuel stored on players’ plants is not in the supply, so heavy stockpiling can starve the refill.

A worked example with five players in Step 1. The 5-player card adds 5 coal, 4 oil, 3 garbage, and 2 uranium. Say the players bought 7 coal this round, emptying the coal spaces priced 1 and 2 and one slot at 3. Refill fills the empty slot at 3 first, then three at 2, then one at 1. The cheapest coal is back to 1, but only one marker sits there. Now say they had bought 10 coal and the supply held only 4. Then only 4 go back, and the cheapest coal is now 3. The rulebook walks through a case like this one.

On the Germany side, once someone buys plant 39 in an auction, uranium stops refilling for the rest of the game.

Job 3: update the plant market

• In Steps 1 and 2: take the largest plant in the future market, put it face down under the draw pile, and draw a new plant to replace it. Re-sort the market.
• In Step 3: remove the smallest plant from the game instead, and draw a replacement. If the draw pile is empty, keep removing the smallest plant each round anyway.

The plants you slide under the pile in the early steps are the big ones. They wait below the Step 3 card and come back later.

When the step changes during bureaucracy

Step 2 begins at the start of bureaucracy, once anyone has reached the trigger in the build phase: 7 cities with 2 to 5 players, 6 with 6. Remove the smallest current plant once and draw a replacement. That same round’s refill already uses the Step 2 column.

Step 3 can also arrive here, if the Step 3 card is the plant you draw in job 3. Remove it and the smallest current plant, with no replacement, and shuffle the draw pile. Step 3 begins with the next round. (If the card turns up during an auction instead, the endgame lesson covers that case.)

A banker’s routine

• Call out each player’s powered cities and payout before handing over money.
• Collect all burned fuel in one pile, then count the refill from the card, fuel by fuel.
• Read the step out loud before refilling: “Step 1 column.”
• Move the plant market last, and announce any plant that comes out.

Run it the same way every round and bureaucracy takes two minutes. More important, fuel stays as scarce as it should be.