Brass: Birmingham
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Brass: Birmingham is an economic strategy game sequel to Martin Wallace’ 2007 masterpiece, Brass. Birmingham tells the story of competing entrepreneurs in Birmingham during the industrial revolution, between the years of 1770-1870.
As in its predecessor, you must develop, build, and establish your industries and network, in an effort to exploit low or high market demands.
Each round, players take turns according to the turn order track, receiving two actions to perform any of the following actions (found in the original game):
1) Build – Pay required resources and place an industry tile.
2) Network – Add a rail / canal link, expanding your network.
3) Develop – Increase the VP value of an industry.
4) Sell – Sell your cotton, manufactured goods and pottery.
5) Loan – Take a £30 loan and reduce your income.
Brass: Birmingham also features a new sixth action:
6) Scout – Discard three cards and take a wild location and wild industry card. (This action replaces Double Action Build in original Brass.)
The game is played over two halves: the canal era (years 1770-1830) and the rail era (years 1830-1870). To win the game, score the most VPs. VPs are counted at the end of each half for the canals, rails and established (flipped) industry tiles.
Birmingham features dynamic scoring canals/rails. Instead of each flipped industry tile giving a static 1 VP to all connected canals and rails, many industries give 0 or even 2 VPs. This provides players with the opportunity to score much higher value canals in the first era, and creates interesting strategy with industry placement.
Iron, coal, and cotton are three industries which appear in both the original Brass as well as in Brass: Birmingham.
New "Sell" system
Brewing has become a fundamental part of the culture in Birmingham. You must now sell your product through traders located around the edges of the board. Each of these traders is looking for a specific type of good each game. To sell cotton, pottery, or manufactured goods to these traders, you must also "grease the wheels of industry" by consuming beer. For example, a level 1 cotton mill requires one beer to flip. As an incentive to sell early, the first player to sell to a trader receives free beer.
Birmingham features three all-new industry types:
Brewery – Produces precious beer barrels required to sell goods.
Manufactured goods – Function like cotton, but features eight levels. Each level of manufactured goods provides unique rewards, rather than just escalating in VPs, making it a more versatile (yet potentially more difficult) path vs cotton.
Pottery – These behemoths of Birmingham offer huge VPs, but at a huge cost and need to plan.
Increased Coal and Iron Market size – The price of coal and iron can now go up to £8 per cube, and it’s not uncommon.
Brass: Birmingham is a sequel to Brass. It offers a very different story arc and experience from its predecessor.
Ages | 14+ |
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Players | 2 Players, 3 Players, 4 Players |
Play Time | 60m – 120m |
Designer | Gavan Brown, Matt Tolman, Martin Wallace |
Mechanics | Connections, Income, Loans, Market, Network and Route Building, Tech Trees / Tech Tracks, Turn Order: Stat-Based, Variable Setup, Hand Management |
Theme | Economic, Industry / Manufacturing, Transportation |
Publisher | BoardM Factory, Conclave Editora, Crowd Games, Dexker Games, Funforge, Gém Klub Kft., Giant Roc, Roxley, Arclight, Ghenos Games, Maldito Games, PHALANX |
AdelinDumitru
Oh man, having to choose between this and Lancashire is so difficult! One of our best times playing Brass was with Birmingham, and beer is so versatile and fun, but I also quite like the simpler rules in Lancashire...both are great titles either way.
2bit
Very clever game, enjoyable overall. Plus points: Great production values for all components and very good value for money. Lovely artwork everywhere. Smooth game play mechanisms - ironed out some oddities of the original game. Fortunes change frequently, so the winner could be anyone. Minus points: The board and card artwork is generally too dark (even on the light side of the board), making it hard for some people to see detail clearly, especially under artificial lights in the evening. The rules are all in the rule book. Not necessarily where you'd expect to find them though. The addition of beer, manufactured goods and pottery is a double edged sword: Nice to have variety but makes things harder to grasp for new players and even experienced players. We found the need for beer to get most things done annoying. Needing coal and iron was already obstacle enough. Lots of fiddly network/connection rules that everyone forgot at some point, necessitating a lot of reversing what you've just done in order to replace it with something legal. AP really set in over the last half a dozen turns as we scrutinized the whole board and our last remaining cards to try to spot final scoring opportunities. Everyone was affected, so the game slowed down a lot, sucking the fun out of it with so much downtime. The last couple of turns had so much AP delay that I went away to fold laundry for a while. Overall I'd play it again but I prefer Brass Lancashire.
5mokus
The game itself is not interesting enough to learn it's metagame. Also, it's terrible at demonstrating the possible value of different strategies, other than the general "rail building" path. Sadly that's one of the best point source in a 4 player game. Lack of game balance and play-testing is an issue. The game is mechanically solid, (It has some beautiful interactions!) But this game itself is under developed. Exploring a game by playing it is fun, but it's usually about learning how to do a strategy, and not finding out, how well a strategy preforms.