Then you have to consider what other players are likely to do next. Be careful which card you choose to play, because you don’t know what cards you will draw next. Deciding what you must do now and what can wait until later is often critical. Hand management is such an important part, as well as timing. The player count will change things up, but also the order in which cards come out. Maybe I’m biased, because I clearly love economic simulation games, but every game of Brass: Birmingham is different. Having played the game quite a number of times now, both in digital as well as physical form, I can assure you that it never gets boring. The same is true for the beer barrels that play a small, but very important part in the game. Moving coal or iron cubes around the board creates a sense of how these resources flow. Feeling the linen-finished cards in your hands is a pleasure. The cards, wooden cubes and beer barrels are also amazing. Every time you spend or earn money, you want to feel its heaviness. You do need the tactility and sound they make. So making the money an active and tangible part of the game is so important. After all, Brass: Birmingham is an economic simulation. You want to feel the weight in your hands as you have to pay for actions. You want to hear the clink of the chips as you stack them in front of you. The cardboard money that comes with the base game simply detracts from the luxurious feeling that the rest of the components convey. I strongly recommend you either go for the deluxe edition or buy decent poker chips. They seem to look down on you and expect you to go from humble beginnings to becoming the owner of a national, industrial empire, just as they did – and that’s no small feat. They clearly have lived a life of grandeur and opulence. You immediately feel transported into the seat of one of the eight industrialists that are described near the beginning of the rulebook. They are functionally the same and only differ in the representation of the map. You can choose between the day or the night side of the board. However, once it’s ready, Brass: Birmingham looks amazing on the table. a close-up of the player boards and the large number of industry tiles stacked and placed in their correct locations Table Presence So you do have to focus during setup, which does make the game feel longer to set up than others, I think. It does take a while to get the game ready and it’s easy to miss something or accidentally have cards in play that are for a different player count or put the wrong industry tile in the wrong space on your player board. Next comes placing the correct number of coal and iron cubes onto the market area of the central game board, as well as putting beer barrels on the relevant spaces underneath merchant tiles. Similarly, you have to sort through the deck of location and industry cards and remove those that aren’t in play for your specific player count, before shuffling them and dealing the relevant number to players. The biggest two jobs that I think take the longest time are sorting through your industry tiles and placing them in the correct locations on your player board, followed by removing merchant tiles not in play for the current player count, shuffling them and dealing them out onto the relevant locations on the central game board. Many games require quite a bit of work before they are ready to play, but it does feel like Brass: Birmingham stands out. Let me start with one of the main differences between the online and physical versions: the setup. Now, having played the physical version a few times, I’m ready to look at how this game continues to delight and how the experience differs from its digital sibling. So eventually I treated myself and ordered the deluxe version of this game. I also knew I definitely wanted the amazing poker chips. Having played it digitally many times, I knew I had to get myself a copy. Yes, it’s time for my second review of the wonderfully illustrated and highly competitive economic simulation game Brass: Birmingham. The rise of cotton mills, potteries and manufacturing gave us the opportunities to earn our Brass: Birmingham by Gavan Brown, Matt Tolman and Martin Wallace from Roxley Games. The workforce needed to be kept happy and beer was the perfect lubricant for this task. A lot of iron was needed to build the infrastructure that would allow resources and goods to be shipped around the country. The industrial revolution was in full swing and coal was at the heart of new, booming industries. Designer: Gavan Brown, Matt Tolman, Martin WallaceĪrtist: Lina Cossette, David Forest, Damien Mammoliti
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