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Below is our Shelfside write-up review for this highly interconnected game across industrial era England, where you play as Entrepreneurs placing industries and links between cities in 3 hours, from 2-4 players.
For different formatting and photos, check out our Brass Birmingham review on Shelfside.co.
Brass Birmingham: Can you amass the most points in TWO eras of entrepreneurship?
Overview and How to Play
This is Black country, all ripe for your business development. Build industries, construct canals, drink beer! Yes, drink beer! Oh by the way, Birmingham is pronounced ‘Birming-um’.
Brass Birmingham has everyone polluting like crazy and building industrial revolution tiles, like Coal Mines, Cotton Mills, or even Pottery on the board, and they give you points. Another big thing is getting points from linking places together through Canals or later, Railroads.
To do all this, just play cards from your hand! To build in ‘Coalbrookdale’, play that ‘Coalbrookdale’ card. To build a Coal Mine anywhere, just have the Coal Mine card. Either way, you pay the Coal Mine cost of a couple of measly pounds, and the tile goes FACE DOWN. If you don’t feel like building, you still have to discard a card.
Every time you build something, its facedown, so you gotta do a little more work to flip them face up to do anything. And if it’s a coal mine, you need to spend all of the coal on it to do that. So you, or even your opponents can start building stuff that costs coal, and use that coal on your mine! Once coal is completely gone from your coal mine, you flip it over, finally letting you grab its goodies, like VP, or an income boost
ProsWe could go on and on about the visual design: things just seamlessly place on the board, the card art is breathtaking, yada yada, what’s all that without good mechanics?
One of Birmingham’s clear immediate strengths is that there’s business interaction EVERYWHERE. As you play the game, players will link spaces to facilitate Coal/Iron/Beer moving across the map, which in turn players need to spend to move their own businesses along. There’s squabbling over owning these limited connection areas for points, but also an air of relief if someone connects in an area you didn’t want to spend effort in. Or sometimes they’ll end up supplying Coal FOR YOU, how convenient!
Brass Birmingham does a fantastic job of depicting that this type of business is NOT a zero sum game. While there are limited spaces and resources, everyone is also bringing resources to existence with some tiles’ starting goods and connecting players to one another!
In practice, you’re frequently excited for other people’s turns while playing this game, because who knows what they’ll do to help your economy? Will they build beer you need to sell stuff? Will they extend links to make it easier for you to sell your unsold goods? Will they just be the hero your economy needs and flip both your iron and coal tiles?
The two era system, yes, two ERAS, also allows for some sweet progression. Not only does the board get partially wiped after the first, or ‘Canal’ era to lead to different interpretations of map presence, the second ‘Railroad’ era is a complete adrenaline rush. Your income will likely be boosted from your work before, and you can lay down the HARD cash (British pounds) to snipe Railroad after Railroad to maximize your points.
You’re encouraged to take a creative approach to every game with how flexible the actions are. Maybe you take a bunch of Loans instead of focusing on income growth! Maybe you don’t build any Canals at all! Maybe you just don’t spend money yet, and stall to see where your opponents go first?
Cons & Nitpicks
To start though this super unique interconnected two era game… aah, the learning experience LOOKS good, but isn’t. There’s an introductory game, but actually sifting through the rules is a bit of a nightmare in sequencing and general quality of life.
Plus, the rulebook doesn’t explain what the “hat” symbol means on the board, which is something that drove us insane, until we realized that OH. A hat means that your own Beer can get teleported anywhere.
Then Brass Birmingham is just gonna be over 2 hours with 4 people, not 2 hours max as the box suggests. Expect more like 3 hours, even once you get it down, because there’s just so much nuance in the board state with 4 you want to take some time. Remember how the game promotes adaptation, and you can’t really plan too far ahead?
Final Thoughts
We’re just continually impressed around every corner as we sunk deeper and deeper into this. You just jump into your opening hand, scour the beautiful board for opportunities, all while adapting turn after turn after turn as your opponents expand. Whether it be the balanced card drawing, unique double era progression, or just loving the I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-my back efficiency, this game is an economic delight. And we have to stress that for how dense it is, is never punishing at ALL.
If you’re not too into euros… but have been on the fence on this because you may be able to swing a 2-3 hour game once in a while… give this a go. This masterful design actually has a lot of contradictions when zoomed out:
* It is heavy with lots of rules, but has low bookkeeping and a very smooth turn structure.
* It is interactive, while not cutthroat-y.
* You draw cards for actions, but aren’t forced to use their front and can discard them instead.
* It highly rewards repeat plays, but doesn’t have any wacky card abilities that would frustrate a newcomer.
* It is long, but that is divided into 2 rounds, and the decks WILL run out to not make anything drag.
* Scoring is all public, but you frequently can’t tell who is winning mid-game because of how dynamic the scoring gets!
Brass Birmingham is this optimistic take on business where you can always always adapt to improve- but don’t get too comfortable, you can always just take out more loans, and snipe your friends’ locations just at Birmingham itself. Or guzzle their beer and watch them moan in agony. This deserves all the praise it gets.
A player connecting, optimistic take on business, where you can always adapt to improve… in 2 eras!.
Recommender Score: 9/10 (Excellent)
Daniel’s Personal Score: N/A
Ashton’s Personal Score: 10/10 (Masterpiece!)
For more detail on our personal scores, check out the timestamps in our full review video here!
