Do you like industrialism? Boardgames? Ruthless capitalism? Then Brass: Birmingham might be the game for you!
This is something that we have to say every 5 minutes or so because of one of the rules. Every time you pay for something, you stack your coins on your Player Token to keep track of spending (you can see this in the upper left area of the picture).
It's pretty easy to forget this, hence the line 😅.
We have:
All these fun tokens sit on your player board, representing your industrial potential. Getting them on the board is important, but even more important is getting them flipped over to their payout side.
You always have a hand of 8 cards, unless it's near the end of the round. Play a card(s), draw back up to 8.
Cards determine where you can place your stuff. You either have to match the city you want to play in, or you can match the industry symbol and build anywhere that your network reaches.
Taking any action costs a card—and as such the cards act as the phase timer. Once they run out, the phase ends too.
This is a pretty complex one. There's lots going on, and a bunch of niggly little rules that will probably take at least two learning games to really absorb (see: "Pay it to the face!")
But, in essence:
In the game we most recently played (top picture) Purple won by a long shot (game score counter is along the edge).
They rushed building iron first, and used their own iron to do some some strategic developing. They got some strong tiles onto the board in phase one and scored them twice (some tiles do that if you get them built early enough). They also managed to corner the beer cities in the north with good scouting. So they have access to private beer which let them ship much more easily that the others.
Orange played the network game (tons of trains!) but it wasn't quite enough.
This is heavy one, with lots of little mechanics that take a while to master. Oh yeah, it's also a sequel! I've not played the first Brass, so I can't compare, but the boys at Shut Up & Sit Down have you covered in their full review:
Thank you for reading. All images taken by me, except where otherwise credited. I've also written about other games, if you're interested!