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 |
abirch123
The absolute best game I've ever played. Not sure what exactly makes it better, but it's the game o crave the most.
Aditceria
This game is perfectly balanced, it builds up intense ambience through the end game. The pick up and delivery mechanic is quite interesting too, the rules makes sense, and the deluxe edition clay chip is marvellous.
agentpatman
This is one of the few games in the bgg top 10 that definitely deserves it. There is something about this game that is really hard to put into words on why it is so great. It is one of those games that you can't wait until your turn to execute some clever maneuvers that are pretty rewarding when pulled off. Partially because they reward you with income for the rest of the game and also it establishes some resources that everyone can use. There is so much cleverness built into every aspect of the game in the card system of discarding the same cards you use to build, into the cards being able to built at locations or specific types of buildings. The buildings themselves as sort of a tech tree of of different resource costs, money costs, end game points, and income. There are several different strategies to pursue and some of that will change from game to game because of the market tiles but really the variability comes from the cards themselves as you can only do what they tell you. The card distribution is interesting because some cards are more important than others and ones you might want to hang onto. The scoring is great because it rewards you for building rails as well as buildings so you really want to excel with both. The flow of the game is perfect as the first round you are really working hard to get something going, laying down rails, getting some buildings out, then all the sudden all the level 1 buildings go away but your network is still in place and you can really ramp up in the second era. It can be very difficult to get started because you often might find you need to take a loan which feels counter to most games you play where that is a bad thing. The artwork and components are top notch, nice linen finish on everything with a small box that really packs everything in. A few complaints would be no player aid which is really unfortunate for some a nice production and you have to rely on the community to understand the different actions. Towards the end of the game you get it but the player aid that comes with it is just a few works and the community just showed me what could have been. I imagine the iron clays are incredible if you get those but the standard cardboard money is just fine. I also dislike that we do have to put the money on the turn order track because it can be a little fiddly to stack, you often can't reach that side of the board, and keeping it near the players can be problematic remembering which pile is what. I wish there was some way to emulate that mechanism while putting that money back in the bank with some sort of numbered tile, or a cube on a numbered track, or something else. The day/night board is an interesting choice it is interesting that it is there I guess for visibility but I wish it was better utilized as some form of extra content in the game... but it probably doesn't need it. There is definitely some setup time sorting and fiddlying with those player tokens which can probably only be solved with a plano or tons of little baggies. The player turn times can also be long as some actions cause a big chain reaction while already giving you a lot to think about. Coupled with the fact that turn order is determined by who spent the least means some players can take 4 actions in a row and take quite a long time. I imagine at higher player counts it is definitely more interaction because of the shared world but man those turns could take forever to come around. For us it is perfect at two because we can take awhile and enjoy the game and discuss as we are going. It is hard to write about games you enjoy because ranting comes so easy, but it is just a fine tuned engine of a game. Everything that exists is there to push you without fluff.