Generally, I’m more of a lurker, but Lemmy is still young and I think we should all contribute a but more. In order to encourage discussion, I’ll be writing micro-reviews for my favorite games by genre in the next couple of days. You’re welcome to join in and review yours or flame me for my terrible taste!
I think it’s appropriate to start with my favorite game of all time - Brass: Birmingham.
TL;DR
Score: 10/10
Positives:
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Very strategic
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Other players actions can be very positive for you
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Networking is very fun
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The random setup really makes games feel completely different from each other
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At the end of the game, you always have a sense of accomplishment, regardless of your score
Negatives:
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Rules are fiddly, every good has a different rule for transportation
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Because the player order changes by amount of money spent, sometimes you go first in one round and last in the next round. This leads to very large downtime
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Takes 2-3 hours
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Scoring is a pain in the ass
The review
I have never played Brass: Lancashire or the original Brass. I tend not to enjoy games where money is also victory points, which is the case for Brass: Lancashire. I like to spend it all! I ended up buying my copy after their kickstarter. I found a deluxe copy in my LGS and after reading a bunch of reviews I decided to give it a go. I didn’t follow the Kickstarter campaign and my opinion was not influenced by it.
In Brass: Birmingham you are playing as an entrepreneur during the UK’s industrial revolution. You’ll be trying to develop several industries and selling them for profit. The game takes place in 2 eras: the canal era and the train era. In the first era you pretty much work on developing your income and a strong canal network. At the end of the era, all your canals and level 1 buildings are removed from the game. The train era will begin and you’ll have to spread tracks along the land.
The thing I love most about this game is how your actions deeply affect your opponent’s in a “positive” way. If you realize your opponent is going to need a lot of coal, you can create a coal mine and connect it to their network. They will be forced to consume coal from the nearest source, which is yours. When all coal is consumed, you get a lot of income. Everybody is happy! I mean, your opponent probably wanted to flip its own coal mine for income… But on the other hand no setup turn was required. Beer is an incredibly important resource, you need to sell your industries and other important actions. You definitely want to produce beer but if it’s connected to the network, everyone can use it! Do you want to become a beer producer or place it somewhere obscure so only you can use it? I find these decisions to be incredibly fun.
The one thing that is a turnoff about the game is how fiddly it can be. Scoring is a pain in the ass, each build scores by adjacent canal/rail roads and you score at the end of each era. Rules can also be a bit fiddly, every resource (coal, iron and beer) is transported with different rules, which can be a bit intimidating. If you can get past that and enjoy the nature of economic games I’m sure this game will be a hit.
One of the things I think make a masterclass game is the feeling you have when you are heavily beaten. I would consider myself to be very weak at this game, I tend not to do great scorewise. However, at the end of the game, I feel fantastic. The decisions I made may not have been the correct ones, but they were fun. To see all my connected industries and all the things I produced always leaves me with a great sense of accomplishment. I can’t recommend it enough.
Context Information
This information is probably not very interesting, but I’ll share it anyway.
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Number of plays: 13
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Suggested player count: 3 players
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Average playtime: 2.5h
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Win-rate: 23%
Honorable mentions
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Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar - I suck so hard at this game… But I ALWAYS have a ton of fun. The gears are fantastic, very clever, very satisfying, very different from everything I’ve played. Definitely something you should try if you enjoy this genre.
What game genre/type would you like to review next?
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Thank you so much for stepping up! I appreciate it a lot. Thanks also for the amazing review! Thats a lot of effort and I cant wait for your others!
Thanks, friend!!
I sort of fell off the boardgaming bandwagon, but I loved OG Brass. We had a dedicated crew that would play it at boardgame night back in the day. Definitely going to check Birmingham out.
From what I’ve read, people who really enjoyed OG Brass tend to not like Brass: Birmingham, at least not as much. It’s makes sense, I suppose, the games are so similar.
Hmm, I’ll have to read up on it more.
Hey, cool stuff! Thanks for the review! I’d love reviews of mid-priced, medium box games that scale well with players, or games that support 6+ players and are not drafting or social deduction.
The huge box games filled with plastic figures are a chore to drag to a game night and are hard to table.
I also struggle to find 6+ player games that are not party games.
I haven’t tried it myself but check out Sidereal Confluence, it might be what you’re looking for.
+1 for Sidereal confluence, I love how 90% of every turn is simultaneous so the playtime is roughly the same and there is almost no downtime regardless of the amount of players, and how attention span is the most important resource, so even if a player decides to check their phone/gets distracted, they are only kneecapping themselves while the others keep playing as usual.
Thanks, that’s a great start! Anything to give Citadels some run for its money. Not sure of Oriflamme was 5 max. Gotta try to get that game on a loan again, it was quite fun.
Had actually never heard of this one. Will have to keep an eye out for it.
Love the review idea btw. I think I’ll do something similar (see my recent post about Wingspan)… mine probably won’t be as detailed (and I don’t keep play counts or w/l stats) but hopefully people will like them
I look forward to reading your posts!
I’ll try to do one every week or so.
Thanks for the review!
Brass is still in my “intimidation zone”. Since you also mention Tzolk’in which is one of my favorites, how would you compare rules complexity between the two?I feel like Tzolkin is relatively easy to teach because the main premise is simple. You either place as many workers are you want or take as many workers as you want. When you take workers perform the action they’re in. When the calendar makes a complete rotation the game ends. Obviously there’s more to it but the main premise is easy to grasp. The iconography is good enough and any questions about actions are easy to answer.
In Brass: Birmigham, though, the main premise is harder to teach. On your turn you perform 2x actions from a list of 7 actions (you can make the same action twice). There are 2 eras, after the first era there’s an almost board-wipe. There are 3 types of goods, each good is transported in different ways. There are a couple of weird edge cases that are not very intuitive as well. For instance, when making a rail road you pay the coal AFTER the rail road is created. Which means you can create a rail road that connects to coal and then pay using that coal you just connected to.
That said, I feel like Tzolkin is harder to play. The wheel mechanism is so different from everything else. In Brass you have some moments of familiarity because you played games that did similar things, the logic clicks faster. I only played Tzolkin for the first time this year and was honestly the best surprise I’ve had in the last couple of years. What a game!
Brass scales surprisingly well. You can tell the designers put a lot of effort into it. So it’s not like one of those 4 player games with a 2-3 player shoe horned in.
My friend and I learned the rules by just doing a two player game which made it a smoother process. You could try doing that with it and then when you bring it to a larger table you have the rules digested already.
Brass B is great. In my group we always joke about it being the game of “no, you can’t do that” due to how often people, especially new players unintentionally make illegal moves. It’s crucial to get your level two buildings out early, as any of those flipped in canal phase will score twice. Breweries are good for this, as is iron. That said, iron is somewhat risky for this strategy because it might get built over later if there’s a shortage on the market. You’ll probably want to hold at minimum you last mine back.
I’ve been wanting to try the original Brass (Lancashire) for awhile now, but haven’t gotten around to it. Some people have told me it’s better, but I’d like to be able to form my own opinion.
My favorite economic game, though, is Indonesia.
I’m one of those OG Brass lovers who hasn’t yet played Brass B. Can’t wait to give it a go – if it’s anything like Brass L, I’m sure I’ll like it.
One of my favorite moments in Brass is when someone (hopefully me) gets to cash in on the hot iron market and make enough money to splurge on something expensive, like double rail links in the same turn.
As an aside, Indonesia looks really cool, but I’m not so good at my times tables :)
Nice! Literally have a new box of this sat on the table, waiting. I’m trying to get better at not caring about my scores so much, but the guy I play with most often is pretty competitive.
Anyway, good to read this, looking forward to more.
What easy eurogames can you recommend? I love machi koro
Is Catan a medium hard eurogame? Is it even a Eurogame?
Check out my Light Eurogames post here
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