Pretty straight-forward question here: In the 2- and 6-player versions of Power Grid, you are instructed to use only 3 areas and 5 areas respectively, but it doesn't say how to pick the areas, leaving it up to the players.
What are good recommendations for determining which areas are in/out?
We use the system where player 1 picks an area to keep, player 2 picks an adjacent area, etc. until we have the right number of areas. I'm nearly positive this is how the designer, Friedemann Friese, taught us. If not then we picked it up from the earlier version of the game, the crayon-based Funkenschlag.
One tip: when the new (current) edition came out I had a chance to play with the designer explaining the rules. We used the pick-an-adjacent-area rule to pick our staring zones and were using the Germany map. With six players we picked five zones, and the one left out was the center zone, leaving a ring-shaped map. Friedemann immediately exclaimed, "We never playtested it that way!"
It turns out that's a pretty poor map to play on since you're restricted to expanding through other people's territory much earlier in the game than you normally would. The result was an extra-long game that frankly wasn't as fun.
So the tip: if you play the Germany map with 6 players, do not eliminate the center territory.
I don't think it really matters so much. But you could randomize it, or else agree to rotate through each of the possibilities on a game-by-game basis, to create as much variety as possible.
Many connoisseurs seem to think that Power Grid is much better for 3-5 players, mind you, so if the lack of hard-and-fast rules for how to set up the 2 or 6 player games is bugging you, it might not be a bad idea to try not to play with that many players, so far as possible!
Generally, we decide as a group whether we want to use the more-dense or the less-dense areas of the map (at least on the U.S. map). It's all about whether we feel like making everybody pay those high connection prices in the west.
I have always done it either a) randomly or b) let the newest player pick, which often leads to the same results as randomly. :) I have never had a case of only 2 players, but with 6 that seems to work pretty well.
