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Review of Brass: Birmingham
Blurb from the publisher: 'Brass: Birmingham tells the story of competing entrepreneurs in Birgmingham and the surrounding area during England's Industrial Revolution, between the years 1770-1870. In this follow up to the original masterpiece, Brass: Lancashire, you will expand your empire by establishing canals and rails, and building and developing various industries, including Cotton Mills, Coal Mines, Iron Works, Manufacturers, Potteries, and Breweries.'
What you get: Your EUR 65 or equivalent will buy you Brass: Birmingham, a hand management and network building euro that hosts from 2 to 4 players and lasts a maximum of two hours. The game has been nominated for quite a few prizes and has even won the Best Strategy Golden Geek in 2018. Thus, it is not that surprising that it has climbed all the way to BGG's top-5 games of all time in only two years after its release.
In addition to the 12-page rulebook that can also be downloaded from the publisher's website free of charge, the game contains the following: one board, 4 Player mats, 4 Character tiles, 4 Income markers, 4 Victory Point markers, 56 Link tiles (14 per colour), 180 Industry tiles (45 per colour), 64 Location and Industry cards, 8 Wild cards, 77 Money tokens, 30 Coal cubes, 18 Iron cubes, 15 Beer Barrels, and 9 Merchant tiles.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have never played Brass: Lancashire. Thus, I cannot meaningfully compare the present game to its forefather.
Gameplay: In Brass: Birmingham players incarnate wealthy industrialists. The goal is to amass the most Victory Points at the end of the game's two eras, the Canal era and the Rail era. Each era plays slightly differently. As an example, in the first er, a player may only build one industry per city, and only construct canal links and not rail links. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Each player begins with GBP 17 and eight cards from the draw deck. Certain cards depict a location on the board, while others a certain type (or types) of industries. Each player has a mat at his disposal, depicting 29 different industries of six different types: Cotton Mills, Coal Mines, Iron Works, Manufacturers, Potteries and Breweries. Each industry has a different number of factories, and each factory is worth a different income increase and victory points for either placement or establishment of links.
The game is played on a map depicting 23 locations where industries can be built. Interestingly enough, the gameboard shows the exact same map on both its sides, once by daylight and once by night time. Locations host from one to four industries, and may be connected by canal or rail links. There are also five Merchant tiles providing different bonuses, namely a free Development, income, victory points and money, depending on where a Sell action takes place.
Depending on the number of players, the game is played in anything from 8 to 10 rounds, until the player's hands, as well as the draw deck, are exhausted. During each round a player can perform two actions out of a list of seven. The actions can be performed in any order, while the same action can be performed twice. Each action requires at least one card to be played in order to execute it.
The Build action is about building an Industry from your mat to the board. You can obviously select the type of industry, when it comes however to the actual tile that will be built they are built in order, from the weakest to the most powerful. Depending on the card that is played to permit this action, the industry can be built on a location that is or that is not connected to the player's existing network. To place the industry however the location must still have space for that particular type of industry. You also have to pay the industry's cost and, depending on the industry, consume coal or iron. When you build Coal Mines, Iron Works or Breweries, they receive a number of goods on them. Players are allows to overbuild, i.e. replace an existing industry with a more potent industry of the same type. There are certain prerequisites depending on whether your industry or an opponent's industry is the one that gets retired.
The Network action is about extending the canal and rail network so that industries can reach other locations with goods and raw materials. The placed link must connect locations already in the player's network. In addition to the standard card and money, Networking also costs coal, at least in the Rail era.
With the Develop action a player can eliminate industries from his play mat so that he doesn't have to put them on the board. It sounds counterintuitive, it is however essential in order for the player to reach the more potent, more efficient industries on his mat. In addition to the card, Developing industries also costs iron. Watch out however: not all Industries can be developed. Some just have to be built.
Selling does what it says; you sell to a merchant, while playing a card, consuming beer (don't get the wrong idea, beer is a substitute for the food and water you have to provide your workers with), and flipping the industry to its reverse side (or at least the Cotton Mills, Manufacturers and Potteries; the other three industries are flipped when their last resource is removed from the tile). Flipping an industry is of paramount importance, since only flipped industries gain Victory Points at the end of the era. Depending on the Merchant that the industry is connected with and sells to, different bonuses can be obtained: a free Develop action, increased income, Victory Points, or a straight out payment.
A Loan is also straightforward and can be achieved through any card: get GBP 30 and be happy about it. Interestingly enough, loans do not have to be repaid. Their only direct side-effect is that they reduce a player's income at the end of each round.
Finally, Scouting is about discarding three cards (any cards) and picking one from the Wild Industry deck and one from the Wild Location deck. The action aims to improve your choice when it comes to doing things, since the Build action requires particular cards.
Players are also allows to Pass, even though they still have to use a card (any card) for it.
At the end of the round, the player who spent the least money will start first in the next round. Depending on one's income level he will either earn money from the bank or he will be obliged to pay. If he can't, he has to liquidate industries or even lose VPs to cover the difference.
At the end of the Canal era players score their links as well as their flipped industry tiles. All links and all level I industries are afterwards removed from the board, while players draw eight new cards after reshuffling the deck. At the end of the Rail era players score their links and flipped industries once again. The player with the most VPs is the winner. Ties are resolved by highest income. If that is also a tie, the most remaining money should do it.
In order to acclimatize the players with its mechanism, Brass: Birmingham also proposes an introductory game that only lasts one era and which has slightly different victory conditions; it also counts moeny and income level as if they were VPs, while flipped industries count twice.
The strong points: Just because you are building a network does not mean that Brass: Birmingham is in any way comparable to Ticket to Ride. There is a very strong competitive element when it comes to industry placement, on the other side however there is a cooperative element relating to the consumption of raw materials (iron, coal and beer) and the transport networks that the game helps create. Your network actions are by definition going to help others. Don't think about it that much, as long as you earn the lion's share of the profit. Too bad that you don't know that the exact moment you implement your action...
I am marveled by how many clever mechanics the game employs. A single one of them would have created quite a furor in any other game. Just look at the pay less now/play first on the next round dynamic. Woah! This is not an obvious rule to execute, and in many ways works contrary to the optimization logic of not hoarding money if that doesn't give you an advantage. In this game however, not spending a huge sum actually gives an advantage, and the arithmetic behind that is solid. Building networks costs cheaper than putting down buildings. One can claim that both benefit the acting industrialist first and foremost, in reality however industries are the main VP earners. If that rule didn't exist, placing networks would have been a vastly inferior choice of action, and let me not mention the action where you pay no money, like Loan or even Pass. Now, you can still further your objectives while getting an extra something in return for the next turn: the chance to grab a desirable location for your future industries.
The Loan mechanic is another excellent piece of design. Borrow at your heart's desire, you are in industrialist for crying out loud. Yet, what is the real cost of a Loan, seeing how your income level does not influence your VP intake at the end of the game? One less action on the board or on your mat, that's what your are paying your cheap money with. Is it worth it? Sometimes yes. Others, no. You'll be the judge of that.
What is however the pinnacle of the game's ingeniousness is how each different industry (not each type, but each single tile of industry), does something different. They all have different costs, and by different I do not mean a simple linear progression. As an example, Manufacturer I costs GBP 8 and one Coal, while Manufacturer VIII costs GBP 20 and two Iron. The former hands out 5 Income if flipped towards that goal, 3 VPs at the end of the era, and will reward you with 2 VPs for your links at the end of the first era before it disappears. The latter will not disappear, and it would only give you a minimal increase of one income if you used it for that... you'd be crazy however to do so, seeing how it provides 11 VPs at the end of the era, plus one VP per link. That's an enormous difference in VPs, so what do you go for? Cheap, one-off industries that will disappear after the first era and will liberate their locations for your opponents to grab a bite? Or expensive, back-breaking industries which however will pay of their part in VPs at the end of the game? The answer is simple: balance your approach for the ultimate benefit. Yet again, is it not easy to gauge where that balance lies.
Overbuilding is yet another potent mechanic, in that you don't just build over your own stuff, but over your opponents' industries as well (or at least, over their Coal Mines and Irons Works). Surprise, fellow competitor, try not to be a cheapskate next time. Admittedly, there are strict qualifiers for this to happen, at the end of the day however wouldn't you have preferred to pay those GBP 2 more in order to get an extra VP at the end of the game, as opposed to paying your sunk cost and get a big fat nothing?
That is in fact one of the game's main strengths. Unless you get a piece of paper and start counting round after round, the map does not allow one to immediately determine how well a player is doing. In a tight game only an accurate count can tell you who is winning, and impressions can be extremely deceiving. I liked that a lot, and especially when you thought that this sob or the other had ruined your chances by doing this move or that, only for you to come out on top in the end. This, of course, can also happen inversely.
Seeing how the game has a variable start, and how many paths there are to victory, its replayability is guaranteed. All you need are committed players who understand the game's intricacies for the experience to be as involved as it should be.
This is one of the few games out there that plays well with all numbers of players. I was not surprised to read that the first part the designers tackled was the 2-player game. It is refreshing to see this; most games nowadays try to satisfy the widest range possible, and come out as unsatisfying for many of the player counts they allegedly accommodate. This one works throughout. Nice!
The game's components are some of the best I have seen on the market. The carboard is ultra thick when it comes to every single cardboard piece: the maps, the mats, and the tokens. The artwork is straight out of another planet. Even more so, I have never seen a double-sided map and mats depicting the exact same thing twice, but in different shades and colour schemes. Thematically, it hits home the idea that production never stopped. Practically, and depending on your eyesight and preferences, you can play on either side of the board or the mats. Hell, you might as well change the side on a whim; it feels as if you are playing a different game. The wooden materials are rather standard fare nowadays, with the exception of the wooden kegs. First, they look cool. Second, if you are not afraid that they will be misplaced, you can actually use them in 28 mm miniature dioramas. The classy approach is completed by the gratuitous insertion of ziplock bags for you to safeguard the game's components.
The weak points: Brass: Birmingham is a committed euro. It comes out as totally abstract, thanks to both its mechanics as well as the disconnect between the terminology and what each action actually does. I have no idea what the victory points emulate, but it seems to be based on an algorithm relating to something as generic as 'progress' and 'bragging rights about contributing to society'. The game is clearly not about making the most money. The Develop action is another prime example of a rather fuzzy theme. Your player mat effectively depicts the ideas in your mind about what to do next with your industrial empire. By 'developing' an industry one discards the ideas about linear advancement and goes on to more extravagant projects. Thematically speaking that's a profoundly thin approach, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter. Some of my favourite games are abstracts (Tigris & Euphrates, I salute you!). This is a warning only for the cases where the lack of links between what a game depicts and what it actually does detracts from the experience. And no, just because the breweries' produce resembles wooden barrels (which, to be blunt, are so different to the totally generic cubes for iron and coal that they raise a few eybrows) the game doesn't suddenly become 'thematic'.
The game is fiddly. No matter which side of the board you use there is a lot of information on every corner of the board and every single tile. It will take you a couple of plays to be able to analyse all that information at an appropriate speed. I don't even expect new players to understand what they are doing mid-game, when the first era transitions into the second. If you didn't pay attention to what you were building, your buildings might get wiped out. That's what bad investments are all about. The game is open to analysis paralysis, and the downtime between players can become overbearing. Thankfully, this is a game where a timer feels right at home. If you can't decide and execute both moves in under a minute, you pass. Sounds brutal? It's not more brutal than 7-year-old children working in your industries, you industrialist prick.
Brass: Birmingham has tons of player interaction, and at the same time it has none whatsoever. There is nothing to negotiate about, nothing to exchange or agree upon. Everything is structured and happens in-game. Each player does his own thing... and that sounds like the definition of a multiplayer solitaire. On the other hand however, everything you do impacts the other players. Build, and you deprive your opponent of a building position, or a raw material; network, and you open up an opportunity to someone that did not exist a moment ago; develop or borrow, and your inaction on the board allows somebody to do something that he wouldn't have access to; scout, and you change the cards others will take. It's baffling really, and it is definitely not bad in itself. At the end of the day however, if you want players that are involved with one another, the game does not satisfy that itch at all.
The rulebook should have been better written. Things are there, yet they are all over the place. The game is not streamlined, with dozens of exceptions left and right. The beer you craft behaves differently to the beer you buy; one era behaves differently to the other; some industries get flipped when they sell, others when they exhaust their materials; the list goes on and on. I do not mind that at all, yet there is no way one can remember them the way things are presented. A small table with the actions and what they require would have helped enormously, yet it's not there. In a rather self-defeating move, the rulebook's web address is only stated on the rulebook itself, and cannot be easily located from the publisher's website. I don't know how well this link will work in a few year's time, yet try roxley.com/Brass-Birmingham-Rulebook. What a great way to alienate your potential customers!
Two minor board layout mistakes: First, I don't mind the Income track and the VP track being placed next to one another. The way they progress is different enough for them to be distinct. What is however a patently bad choice is how similar the round income markers and the hexagonal VP markers look like. These shapes are too close to one another; one should have been a 3D triangle, or a pyramid, or a flat rectangle, or something totally different to a cylinder. Not everybody is an airplane pilot to see things from far away in such a busy board, and with all the things happening in the game, this is the last thing players want to be confused about. Second, would it have been so hard to use the exact same layout for the tiles' values both on the tiles as well as the player mats? Again, the different approach adds needless visual complexity to a game that needed none of it.
Conclusion: Brass: Birmingham's position in BGG's top games is not unjustified. It succeeds in pretty much everything it sets out to do with innovative mechanics, high replayability, and many approaches to victory. One of few games out there that works well irrespective of player count, it comes out as an engaging brain-burner. Thematically however it comes out as a heavy-handed abstract, while other misgivings raise questions as to whether its staying powers are as strong as its first impression. A 4,5 / 4,5 would have been more accurate, but since I can't give that grade, a 4 / 5 it is.
For more info on Brass: Birmingham visit Roxley at at http://roxley.com.
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