Glen Less

Last night's "PlayGamesWithJosh" did not happen in its traditional sense.
But my wife was free and wanted to play boardgames with me, so I grabbed up that opportunity.

I have been so excited to try out Glen More since I picked it up, I set it all up and started reviewing the rules.
Now, I am not the best game-explainer, but I started to go over things with her, and.. well, her eyes just glazed over with the complications.
Glen More seems to be one of those games where you can "just start playing and figure things out as you go", but there are still a lot of bits to point out.
Therefore, the game got vetoed before you could say "I sell my sheep".

So we packed that up and put it away. It will be a game for another time.
(Incidentally, the one thing I do want to say about Glen More is that I think I might need to pick up a pack of alternative wooden meeples to represent the resources. It does cause a bit of an immersion problem, not to mention the cubes being a little too small and lose-able).

So, Power Grid came out of the box instead.
We decided to try the Spain/Portugal map, with the basic deck (no promos).
Fairly straightforward.
The special rules for Spain/Portugal are easy to explain:
If you ONLY own cities in Portugal, then you are not allowed to bid on Nuclear Power Plants.

Now, especially in 2-player, this is pretty silly. You don't have to include Portugal as one of the available regions, (not even with 6 players). Granted, it has some cheap connections, but we really only chose Portugal so we could see how it affected the whole game.
But also, by the time you are interested in nuclear power plants, I'm not sure anybody would be exclusively settling in Portugal, except for a particularly nasty cornering scenario with more players. I think this rule really has zero effect.

3 of the mid-range Wind Plants (18, 22, and 27) are removed from the deck, and placed back on top of the deck in order at the start of Step 2

I'm not sure of the justification of this rule, except to slow down access to the bigger nuclear plants in the mid-game when they are most powerful. By this time, these 3 wind plants aren't extremely desirable.

Uranium replenishes zero during Step 1.
Not so much a "special rule", but notable to the other 2 points. It starts out cheap but doesn't replenish during step 1, and replenishes best during step 2.

Overall, I think that even with more players, Spain/Portugal is kind of "meh" and doesn't change enough from the basic map that I'd really be enthusiastic about trying it again.

I really want to try out the Korea map, because it seems to have the most interesting effect on the rules (2 different markets). Maybe next time...