BRASS: BIRMINGHAM

I did not have the good taste to back this game on Kickstarter when I had the chance but my brother-in-law did, and within a few weeks of trying out his KS edition I would obtain my own copy of the retail edition. A few weeks after that I caved and bought the premium chips (they come in the bigger box of the KS edition) to use as money in the game. I then made my friends play it with me several more times in 2018 as my new obsession. And I will continue to do so unapologetically because it's simply a fantastic game.

Birmingham is a reimplementation of board game classic BRASS, which I admit I did not find appealing. The art of the old game looked old & tired and the mechanics needlessly complicated, the kind of game that The I.T. Crowd made fun of in their spoof of board game YouTube reviews. Well, this new edition fixes the art problem with double-sided, beautifully detailed night & day boards of the sooty English Midlands circa the Industrial Revolution. And after playing several games, I will say that the mechanics are needfully complicated in order to craft the experience the designers want you to have.

And that experience is one of a competitive race to efficiently develop a network of varied industries across the board connecting to a selection of different markets (which are variable from game to game) where you'll make your sales, driving your income and eventual victory point gains.

Your player board will present you with your different industries as tiles in their own hierarchy of development. You'll pay money and resources using the BUILD action to get those tiles on the board into your network, which are cities you've connected by your canals (railroads in the 2nd half of the game) using the NETWORK action. You can burn lower level tiles off your player board with the DEVELOP action in order to get to the good stuff above it. The SELL action is where you go big time, flipping tiles on the board to get the income boost and access to their VP. Level II and higher industries may score twice, at the end of the canal phase and then again at end game in the railroad phase. BUT you can only sell if you're networked with a market that accepts those types of goods and IF you have a barrel of beer for each tile you flip. Beer is the lubricant that keeps this machine going, and Breweries are an industry tile you can build onto the board for yourself and other players to sip. Beer, Coal, & Iron will actually come out onto the board on their respective tiles... be careful with placement & intended use because they're available to everyone who's connected to them! But when those resources are used up off the tile, it will flip as in a SELL and the owner will get its income & VP.
You can also take a LOAN action for £30 or SCOUT to get a Wild city & industry card.
You can only do two of these actions on your turn, and you'll have to discard a card from your hand to do each action. I should point out that when you do BUILD, you'll need cards from your hand that actually match the city or the industry space on the board where you intend to place the tile. It gets tough.
The end of the canal phase will see your network scored and canals wiped from the board along with your Level I tiles. Railroads are the new big thing and they're expensive, so I hope you've got income to work with and that you can make something new of the industries you've still got on the board.

This whole mishmash of rules, actions, & phases will present you with a tense and fiddly, deeply engaging, competitive puzzle that will absolutely reward the experienced gamer. And the experienced gamer is absolutely the target audience for this handsomely updated version of a classic game.

As an aside, I did create a Spotify playlist in an attempt to create an engaging atmosphere for the game, which you can find HERE should you want to check it out to use in the future.

QUICK HITS
Theme:  Industrial Revolution
Gameplay: Economic hand management.
Components: Just fantastic even without the premium Iron Clay money chips.
Replayability: Complexity might make it harder to get to the table, but rewarding experience.
Rulebook: Really good.

Link to Brass: Birmingham on BGG...