Review: Brass – Birmingham

Introducción

Brass: Birmingham tells the story of the entrepreneurs who competed in Birmingham and its surroundings during England’s Industrial Revolution, between the years 1770 and 1870. In this reimplementation of the original masterpiece, Brass: Lancashire, you will expand your empire by constructing canals and railway lines, and you will build and develop various types of industries, such as cotton mills, coal mines, manufactureries, breweries, iron industries, and potteries.

This is how Brass: Birmingham is presented to us, a new version of Martin Wallace’s classic (Age of Steam, A Study in Emerald, A Few Acres of Snow) with the collaboration of Gavan Brown and Matt Tolman, both responsible for designs like Super Motherload or JAB: Realtime Boxing. The game was published in 2018 by Roxley Games after a successful crowdfunding campaign via Kickstarter. The artwork is handled by Lina Cossette, David Forest (the duo behind the look of games like Santorini or Charterstone), and Damien Mammoliti (The Witcher Adventure Game, Edge of Darkness).

In our country, it is available in a Spanish version published by Maldito Games (although the game is completely language-independent). It allows games for 2 to 4 players, with a suggested minimum age of 14 years and an approximate duration of between 60 and 120 minutes. The retail price is €60. For this review, a copy of the Spanish version by Maldito Games has been used, which the publisher itself has kindly provided to us.

Importante: si ya conoces el juego y/o sólo te interesa mi opinión sobre el mismo, puedes pasar directamente al apartado de Opinión. Los apartados Contenido y Mecánica están destinados especialmente a aquellos que no conocen el juego y prefieren hacerse una idea general de cómo funciona.

Contenido

Inside a two-piece cardboard box (lid and bottom), measuring 29.7×29.7×5 cm (a square box with dimensions similar to Ticket to Ride, but with much less depth), we find the following components:

Central Board (cardboard)
4 Player Boards (cardboard)
76 Cards (63.5×88 mm):
64 Location/Industry Cards
8 Wild Cards
4 Player Aids
77 Money Tokens (cardboard)
4 Income Markers (wooden)
4 Character Tiles (cardboard)
56 Double-Sided Link Tiles (cardboard)
180 Industry Tiles (cardboard)
30 Black Coal Cubes (wooden)
18 Orange Iron Cubes (wooden)
15 Beer Barrels (wooden)
9 Merchant Tiles (cardboard)
4 Victory Point Markers (wooden)
Rulebook

Mecánica

A revision of Brass that moves the action to England’s second most populous city. It is an economic game in which players must build logistical networks between their industries and demanding centers to achieve full productivity. The main mechanic is hand management with two types of cards: industry (can be built in any city within our network) or city (allows any industry to be built and does not have to be within our network). Construction always carries a cost, so we must have secured funds beforehand, either through income or by taking out a loan. The game is divided into two eras: canals (before the Industrial Revolution) and rail connections (during the full development of the steam engine), with a scoring phase at the end of each. To build the different elements, we will have to make use of two main resources: coal and iron (which can be purchased from the market or from player tiles) and, as a novelty in this design, beer, which will be needed to activate the buildings that generate goods. At the end of each era, players score the elements they have on the board, with connections and certain buildings being removed during the transition from one era to the next.

Conceptos Básicos

Let’s start, as always, with the Main Board:

Most of the board is occupied by a map of the West Midlands region, where the city of Birmingham and its surroundings are located. Of note are the connections to external markets, which show a series of spaces where the demand will be placed, and associated with them, a space to place beer along with a bonus if it is used.
On it, we will mainly find a series of cities with spaces to build industries, which will be connected to each other by blue lines (canals) or black lines (rail connections), as well as external markets, with symbols indicating if they are used based on the player count and potential bonuses to be received for being the first to serve that market.
In the bottom left, we will find the turn order area and a space to place players’ expenditures.
In the top left, we will find three spaces to place the draw deck and the wild cards.
In the bottom right corner, we find a small reference chart regarding the construction cost of canals and rail connections and how resources are transported.
On the board’s border, we find a double track for scoring and income. For income, the groupings of spaces in different color tones must be taken into account when taking out loans.
And finally, on the right side, we find the Coal and Iron markets, with a series of spaces and an associated pound value.

Throughout the game, players will build a series of industries in the different cities. The industries that can be placed in a city are limited in both number and type. We have six types of industries that can be divided into two groups. On one hand, production buildings: Cotton Mills (building), Manufactories (crate), Potteries (kiln). And on the other, resource buildings: Coal Mines (cart), Iron Works (machinery), and Breweries (barrels). These industries are represented by small, double-sided tiles (with an illustration depicting the type) containing the following information:

On the inactive side (background completely in the player’s color):
- The top left corner shows the level of the tile.
- The top right corner, for some production buildings, shows crossed-out beer symbols, indicating that this resource is required to activate the building.
- The bottom right corner, for resource buildings, shows how many resource units are placed as soon as the industry is built.
On the active side (background split between the player’s color and black):
- The top left corner again shows the level of the tile.
- The top right corner displays the link symbol for valuing connections.
- The bottom left corner shows the victory point value of the building once flipped.
- And finally, the bottom right corner shows the income increase when activating the tile.

To organize the tile supply and avoid constantly flipping them over to check what each provides when activated, each player has a player board. Here, each type of industry is organized into a series of spaces where unbuilt building tiles are placed on their inactive side (so players know what they provide as soon as they are built and what they require to flip). On both sides of each space, the information shown on the active side of each tile is displayed. Each type of industry will have a series of technological levels, meaning a player cannot build a tile unless they have cleared the board of all tiles from previous levels. Additionally, there are certain tiles that can only be built during the first phase of the game, indicated by a half-circle symbol with a blue background (canal era).

To develop their logistical network, each player must establish connections on the board by taking advantage of the pre-established routes in each phase (canals in the first, rails in the second). Each player will have a supply of double-sided tokens (barge on one side, locomotive on the other) that will be placed on these connections to link two cities. At the end of each era, these connections will have a value dependent on the active industries between the two cities linked by the route.

When activating production buildings, players must connect to external markets, which display merchant tiles containing either a production building symbol (cotton mills, manufactories, or potteries), a blank space (no demand), or all 3 symbols. These tokens feature symbols on their top band indicating whether or not they are used in the game based on the player count.

There are three resources to manage in this game. First, coal will be required to build certain tiles as well as to lay rails in the second era of the game. Iron will be required for many other tiles, in addition to developing different building types. Finally, and as a novelty in this game, beer, which will be necessary to activate most production buildings. These resources will appear on the board when players build the tiles that produce them and can be used by all players, assuming certain restrictions:

To use coal from a mine or beer from a brewery, a connection must exist to the source of the resources.
Iron, however, can be taken from any iron works, regardless of connection. With one exception: a player’s own breweries function like iron for them; that is, they do not need a connection to the brewery to use it when activating production buildings or building rails.
This also applies to iron and coal from the market supply on the board. Coal requires a connection between one of the markets and the spot where you want to build, whereas iron faces no such limitation.

The other major resource in the game is money, which is managed directly by the players. It will be used to develop infrastructure and industries. There are only two ways to obtain it during the game: through income at the start of each round or by taking out loans, which will lower our position on the income track. It may happen that a player owes money at the start of a round (falling into negative values on the income track) and does not have enough money to cover these losses, forcing them to lose industry markers on the board.

Associated with money, we have the turn order track. At the end of each round, a new turn order will be established based on how much the players have spent, with the first player being the one who spent the least and the last player being the one who spent the most.

The engine of the game is the Cards, which allow players to execute various actions. These cards display information in their bottom right corner regarding whether or not they are used in the game based on player count. There are two types of cards:

Location Card: specifies a particular city but makes no reference to any industry type, allowing any industry represented in that city to be built.
Industry Card: specifies an industry type but makes no reference to a city, so we can build in any location that has an available space of the corresponding type, but with the restriction that the city must be connected to our network.

There is a special type of card, a novelty in this design: the Wild Cards. During the game, a player will have the option to use one of their actions to discard two cards from their hand and draw two wild cards, one for industry type and one for location. These cards are returned to their respective piles once used.

The goal of the players will be to accumulate as many victory points as possible. These will be achieved at the end of each era, scoring the points indicated on active tiles of the player’s color, as well as the value of connections (dependent on the active tiles in each city linked by the route, regardless of who owns those industry tiles).

During the game, players will have a certain level of income that will increase as they activate industries and decrease when loans are taken out. At the end of each round, players will receive income or pay interest depending on where their marker is located.

And with that, we have enough.

Preparación de la Partida

The main board is unfolded on the table.
A general supply is formed with coal and iron cubes, beer, and coins.
The coal and iron markets are filled, placing a cube in each space except for spaces marked with a dot, which are left vacant.
The merchant tiles are shuffled and randomly placed in the corresponding spaces (unused tiles are returned to the box). In games with fewer than 4 players, some spaces and tiles are not used.
For all placed merchant tiles that show any production building symbol, a beer barrel is placed in the adjacent space.
The deck of cards is shuffled and placed in the appropriate space (in games with fewer than 4 players, cards that are not used are returned to the box).
Wild cards are placed in 2 piles according to type in the corresponding spaces.
Each player chooses a color and receives a technology board, a set of industry tiles—which they place face-down (on their inactive side) in the corresponding space according to level and type (some spaces hold multiple tiles)—a set of link tokens, a victory point marker placed on the 0 space of the track, an income marker placed on the 10 space (0 income), 17 pounds, and a turn order token.
Each player receives 8 cards as an initial hand. Additionally, each player draws one card face-down from the deck to start their discard pile.
The starting player is chosen, placing their turn order token in the first space, and the rest are placed in clockwise order.

We are ready to begin!

Desarrollo de la Partida

A game of Brass: Birmingham unfolds over two eras. Each era is resolved over a set number of rounds until all cards are exhausted, at which point an era transition process takes place.

In each action round, players, following the established turn order, will take a turn in which they can execute 2 actions (with the exception of the very first round of the game, where they can only execute one action). The available actions are:

Build Industry. The player discards a city card containing a free space of the industry type (or an owned industry that can be overbuilt if it is of a lower level) and places the corresponding tile (the one with the lowest value, taking era restrictions into account) face-down (inactive side, background completely in the player’s color). To do so, they must place the construction cost in their spending pile next to their turn order token. If coal units are required, they must be taken from the closest mine (the one needing the fewest hops to move the cube) or, failing that, from the market (if the location is connected to a market). If this second route is chosen, the tile’s cost will increase based on the price of coal (the lowest-cost cube is taken). The same applies to iron, though here there is no distance limitation, allowing it to be taken from any iron works (it does not have to be connected). If resource units are taken from a mine or iron works and it is emptied, it is flipped over and the corresponding player’s income increases.
Build Canal/Rail Connection. The player discards any card (its content is irrelevant). The player places a link token (depending on the era we are in) on a free route. In the canal era, a single canal can be built per action at a cost of 3 pounds, while in the rail era, one can be built for a cost of 5 pounds, or two for a cost of 15 pounds, one unit of coal (which must be accessible in one of the 2 connected cities), and one unit of beer from an owned or another player’s connected brewery. The player must own an industry tile in one of the two connected cities or have reached one of them with another connection.
Develop Industry. Through this action, players discard one or two industry tiles from their player boards (not necessarily of the same type). Developing an industry (removing a tile) requires an iron cube, which must be taken from an iron works on the board or, failing that, from the iron demand track. If this second case applies, the cost of the iron must be paid, placing the money in the player’s spending area.
Sell. The player discards any card and activates as many productive industries as they wish (cotton mills, manufactories, and potteries), flipping the tiles. For each flipped tile, the income marker is advanced the indicated spaces. The following requirements must be met:
- The industry must be connected to a market that demands the produced good.
- If the industry tile shows a beer symbol, the player must use a beer barrel from the board to activate the tile. This can be taken from an owned brewery (does not need to be connected) or another player’s brewery connected to the city where the tile is located. If they are the first player to serve that market, they can use the beer located there and also receive the indicated benefit.
Take a Loan. Any card is discarded and the player receives 30 pounds from the bank. As a consequence, they will move their income marker back 3 sections (placing it on the highest-value space of each reduced section) or will have to slide their income marker back one band, meaning moving their marker to the next space with a background color different from the current one.
Scout (Take Wild Cards). The player discards 3 cards and draws one wild card of each type, adding them to their hand. When using these cards, they are returned to the corresponding wild card pile (not to the discard pile).

At the end of each action round, there is a small maintenance phase consisting of the following steps:

Income. Each player will take from or return to the supply as many coins as indicated by the value of the space occupied by their income marker. If a player does not have enough cash to face a payment, they must remove an industry marker from the board, receiving half the construction cost of the marker rounded down. It is possible that a player might have to return more than one marker.
Turn Order: players’ tokens are reordered based on the amount of money spent (from least money to most money).

Following this, a new round begins.

The end of an era is reached when the draw deck is exhausted and all players have run out of cards, proceeding as follows:

Scoring:

Each player scores as many points as indicated by active tiles of their color on the board.
Each player scores as many points as the sum of link symbols on active tiles located in cities connected by one of the player’s link tokens (regardless of who owns those industry tiles).

Era Transition (only at the end of the canal era):

All level I industry tiles are removed from the board and returned to the box (those remaining on the player’s player board stay there).
Each player retrieves all link tokens and returns them to their personal supply.
A beer barrel is replenished in each space adjacent to a non-empty merchant tile.

Following this, rounds can continue.

Fin de la Partida

The game ends after the evaluation of the rail era. The player with the most victory points will be the winner. In case of a tie, the following criteria are used:

The player with the highest income level.
The player with the largest amount of money at the end of the game.

If the tie remains unresolved, the players share the victory.

Opinión Personal

When Roxley Games announced they had acquired the rights to Brass, I had mixed feelings. On one hand, there was the fear of them messing with a classic and one of Martin Wallace’s best designs. But on the other hand, there was the possibility that a sublime design could reach many more people, since, like it or not, it had a significant barrier in its visual department, causing rejection among many players who wouldn’t even give it a chance.

Fortunately, the design was kept pristine and only given a facelift. The thing is, we live in a world driven by novelty, and on Kickstarter, you always have to offer something extra to hook backers. Since changing even a single rule of the original Brass would have generated a lot of controversy, the campaign managers had a magnificent idea: publish a parallel game. A design where they could actually apply modifications without original design purists crying foul. Besides, Wallace himself had already done something similar with Age of Industry (see its tocho-review here). That is how we arrived at Brass: Birmingham. Let’s see what modifications it applies and how this affects the gaming experience, though not before thanking Maldito Games for providing the copy that makes this tocho-review possible.

But since it’s likely many readers are looking at this without knowing Brass (see its tocho-review here), now known as Brass: Lancashire, here is a brief reminder of the design’s virtues and why it is mind-blowing. In Brass, we took on the role of Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurs eager to grow their fortune. To do this, we had to establish different industries and manage the creation of routes to deliver the generated goods. This relied on a core hand-management mechanic using cards. These cards came in two types. On one hand, industry cards, which specified a type of industry to build on the board (coal mines, iron works, cotton mills, etc.), or city cards (cities printed on the map showing a series of spaces with specific demanded industries).

Throughout the rounds, players must use their cards to establish these industries in various locations and, crucially, generate a logistical network that allows them to create a demand loop where producing industries can send generated goods to a destination and thus start turning a profit.

One of the details that most caught (and still catches) attention was that two-act development, as if it were a football match, which simulates the brutal impact brought by the Industrial Revolution. In the first, logistics are based on transporting various goods via canals, taking advantage of existing natural tributaries. However, the second phase depicts how railways became the dominant transport method, rendering the connections from the first phase obsolete, just like many industries that were unable to meet demand due to low technology levels and were swept off the board.

That near-reset forced players to make decisions looking across a very wide time horizon. On one hand, you have to seize the moment and try to generate maximum points and income while establishing industries isn’t as costly (the tech level is low) or establishing routes (hardly any civil work was required when transporting goods via naturally existing canals). But of course, once halftime arrived, it felt as though a hurricane ripped across the board and took almost all tokens with it, leaving only those industries of a slightly more advanced tech level, which would be used as a jumping-off point for many player actions. This forces you to think very carefully about where and when to establish businesses.

This is why Brass is a masterpiece. An economic game that is relatively accessible mechanically (though it has two or three very subtle concepts you must master to avoid blunders) and manages to convey its theme magnificently. When everyone at the table commands the game and is aware of how a match unfolds, we enjoy delightful moments of tension, with a spectacular level of interaction reflected in a constant struggle for board positioning. All while keeping a very high level of demand when managing timing (an action executed when it shouldn’t be can ruin your plans). A true must-have for this type of game, and now there are no excuses not to get it.

Brass is a demanding economic game that requires knowing the rulebook down to the millimeter because a tiny detail you fail to exploit can mean the difference between victory and defeat. But this demand isn’t at odds with mechanical accessibility, as the core pillar of the game is relatively approachable, and the available options aren’t overwhelming. Either way, it’s highly recommended to have a player at the table capable of resolving doubts on the fly to enjoy it right from the first game. Otherwise, it’s very likely errors will slip through by overlooking some minor detail.

But anyway, today we are here to talk about Brass: Birmingham, which many ask about, especially if they haven’t tried the original game. Let’s try to shed some light on the matter so you clearly see what this spin-off offers (and what it doesn’t). First of all, Messrs. Brown and Tolman seem to have wanted to turn down the tension dial a notch compared to what was experienced in Brass. To do this, they made a series of decisions focused on this goal and, in the process, gave the experience a different flavor.

The first and fundamental change is the disappearance of Ports (the industry that allowed flipping cotton mills in Brass or manufactories in Age of Industry). To establish a productive connection, a player had to build a goods-generating industry in one spot and connect it to a port in another. Obviously, ports could only be built in cities with access to the sea or navigable rivers. Thus, when performing a sell action, the presence of an unactivated port to flip was necessary, with the crucial detail that said port didn’t have to belong to the active player.

Since we are now in an inland region, it makes sense that there are no ports. So we are left solely with external markets, something that also existed in Brass. And here we find the second difference among the relevant ones. Luck is completely gone, and external markets feature infinite demand. Now we won’t have a tile stack modifying income based on demand, potentially exhausting it and preventing external markets from being used again until the era change (or for the rest of the game). To put some boundaries on this festival of permissiveness, these markets are now a bit more selective and demand specific types of goods, so we’ll find that, for a certain type of good, we’ll be forced to establish a connection with specific markets, as connections with markets that don’t demand those products won’t do.

The design could have turned out too loose, which brings us to the third novelty: breweries. We now have a new industry type that, for practical purposes, replaces ports, since beer will be needed to activate most production industries. This new resource type behaves in a dual way compared to coal and iron. If the brewery belongs to the active player, the beer generated by it can teleport to any of that player’s industries without needing a prior connection. But conversely, if the brewery belongs to another player, it is mandatory that the brewery’s location and the industry we want to activate are linked by a route (which does not have to belong to the player).

So, in essence, ports have been replaced by breweries, with the subtlety that a player now has the option to open breweries in far-off points on the map and exploit their benefits, while the rest of the players will have to spend turns connecting them if they want to enjoy their alcoholic brew before the owner makes good use of it. In this way, while a suggestive degree of opportunism still exists, it isn’t as spectacular as in Brass (this is the negative side). On the positive side, it’s a versatile, thematic, and slightly kinder solution for players, which isn’t bad at all for first games.

Where the design has hardened slightly is in building routes with a single action during the rail era. In addition to the fifteen pounds and coal cube required in the original design, a unit of beer is now additionally needed. It’s an alternative way for this new industry type to drain its supply and start scoring relatively early, but it also acts as a brake on this option, adding a new variable to the equation.

Another major change is the appearance of wild cards. These come to smooth out an edge present in Brass that arises when a player’s hand doesn’t offer the options they need at a given moment. Both in Brass and Age of Industry, players are allowed to use both actions of their turn to generate a “virtual wild card” and build whatever industry they want in whichever city they see fit without having to have reached it with their network (though they will still need to bring coal if required). This emergency solution can be too damaging for a player, especially at key moments in the game, so a new action is now enabled that lets players discard 3 cards from their hand to receive 2 wild cards, one for industry type and one for location. Now, excuses like “I just haven’t seen any card for that city or industry all game” will no longer fly.

We could say that this covers the major modifications, though a couple of small details remain. The first is the simplification of the loan action. Players no longer have the choice of how many pounds they want to request; it is now a fixed amount of thirty, dropping down three corresponding segments on the income track. It is a wise decision given that it was an action where the player’s actual room for maneuver wasn’t really there, as, except for very specific moments, 30 was almost always requested. Think about it: to make it profitable not to lose them, more than 10 turns would have to pass from receiving the loan until the game ends. The temporal restriction is also removed, allowing a loan to be taken on any turn (unlike in Brass, where once the deck ran out, this action was blocked in those last four turns of each era).

A small incentive is also introduced for players to want to connect to markets and make the first sale there, offering a small bonus and a beer barrel available without needing to build a brewery, which, again, works great for novice players so they have a clear objective from the start of the game: build an industry, connect it, and sell.

Among these minor details, the one that satisfies me most is scalability, and this is the aspect that might make many people tip the scale toward Brass: Birmingham over Brass: Lancashire. Thanks to the markets and the card deck (both are scaled, and elements are removed based on player count), it achieves a design that manages to keep a relatively stable level of tension and interaction regardless of the number of players. By this, I don’t mean that Brass: Birmingham reaches those almost orgasmic sensations experienced in a four-player game with seasoned veterans, but we won’t feel like the design falters too much. If possible, any Brass should be played at four, but if we are fewer than four, I think I would almost always opt for Birmingham. If we are four, then I would probably stick with the original. But if you like Brass, the normal thing is to end up having both and viewing this Birmingham as another map for a fabulous design.

The replayability level holds up over time because it’s a game with spectacular possibilities. Almost like a chessboard, depending on the cards and decisions, we can experience various types of openings and strategies. It’s one of those games that, thanks to wonderful feelings during and at the end of the match, hits the table easily if players master the design. I would never say no to a game of Brass.

Let’s move on to production. We find ourselves with a high-quality product, with cardboard slightly thicker than average that punches out wonderfully (and satisfyingly). The cards are top-tier, with great weight, a very nice linen finish, and excellent snap (though since cards are handled a lot, I recommend sleeving). The wooden components are standard—a bit lacking in density, but functional. The rulebook is magnificently structured, though there are a few minor details that are hard to find.

Time to talk visuals. During the crowdfunding campaign, there was plenty of controversy and fear surrounding the dark tone of the boards (even on their day side), since Brass is a game that demands a clear view of the board situation at all times. And while it’s true the map is overloaded with ornamental elements, during the game they recede into the background and you manage to distinguish players’ tokens more or less clearly. Perhaps here they could have pushed things a bit further by using player colors with higher contrast. But it’s undeniable that these new editions of Brass are far more visually attractive than Peter Dennis’s spartan, yet extremely functional, maps. The cards look spectacular and the cover art is an absolute marvel. In this sense, Brass: Birmingham surpasses Brass: Lancashire. I love the play of lights and contrasts in that puddle on the cobblestones showing a reflection of what appears to be a person carrying cargo. Sublime.

And let’s wrap things up. Brass: Birmingham is a superlative design that masterfully refines the subtle and demanding economic framework of its predecessor, striking a milimetric balance between the raw nature of its interaction and an stimulating tactical flexibility. The dual loop of its industrial development, subtle hand management through cards, and the brilliant incorporation of beer as a backbone resource unleash fierce positioning dynamics and deliciously suffocating moments of tension. Although it requires a milimetric reading of the game’s pacing to avoid throwing away entire turns, its mechanical elegance and the depth with which the economic theme emerges cement it as a true titan of the tabletop. It scales better, and this is a huge point in its favor, even if it’s true the original still feels very slightly superior to me. But that doesn’t stop it from being a magnificent reimplementation, which is why I give it an…