sunblush

Box Photo by Ben­jamin Pachner

Brass is a medium-weight strat­egy board game for 3 to 4 play­ers. It was designed by Mar­tin Wal­lace, and was first pub­lished in 2007 by War­frog Games in the UK. Since then, it has been dis­trib­uted in US, and to date, has enjoyed two suc­cess­ful reprints. The copy of the game used in this review is the first US edition.

Please note: This is just a gen­eral overview and review of the game, not a care­ful walk-through of the rules. There is plenty of in-depth dis­cus­sion of Brass in the forums at BoardGameGeek, if that’s what you’re after.

A brief rundown

In the game of Brass, you are an indus­tri­al­ist entre­pre­neur in 19th-century Lan­cashire, Eng­land. Your goal is to build cot­ton mills, coal mines, iron works, ports, ship­yards, canals, and rail­ways, each of which can be used by you (and the other play­ers) in some fash­ion to earn money and score points. Mean­while, the other play­ers are try­ing to do the same thing – it’s a race to see who can best take advan­tage of the economy.

Brass is one of those games that encour­ages you to plan out your actions ahead of time. In order to score, you have to build. In order to build, for exam­ple, not only must you have enough pounds to pay for the build­ing, but you often must have coal as well, and you’ll be pre­sented the choice of devel­op­ing your own coal mines, using some­one else’s mines (which gives them vic­tory points), or buy­ing coal at the mar­ket price.

One extremely cool aspect of the econ­omy in Brass is that play­ers influ­ence both demand and sup­ply. If there is a glut of coal on the board, then it can be had very cheaply. In a coal short­age, you’ll pay dearly for it (as well as raise the price for play­ers who buy after you). Of course, you can always build a coal mine to increase the sup­ply, thereby dri­ving the price down and earn­ing you income at the same time.

That was just one exam­ple. There is far more to Brass than I’m describ­ing here, but suf­fice it to say that it’s a deep, tense, sat­is­fy­ing expe­ri­ence to play. More on that later.

Photo by Geo

What’s in the box?

The phys­i­cal com­po­nents of Brass are amaz­ingly good, with one excep­tion which I’ll men­tion now: the coins. The coins are cat­e­gor­i­cally awful, noth­ing more than plas­tic tiddly-winks that are dif­fi­cult to stack, and have a propen­sity for slip­ping (and even fly­ing) all over the place. Throw them away, and use poker chips instead.

Now that the one truly neg­a­tive bit has been outed, I’ll focus on the over­whelm­ingly pos­i­tive. First, the art­work is absolutely fan­tas­tic, very the­matic and evoca­tive of the period. The game board presents the rough geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion of each town fea­tured in the game, as well as sev­eral fla­vor illus­tra­tions. The cards are attrac­tive and quite useable.

Photo by Henk Rolle­man

The player col­ors (red, yel­low, green, pur­ple) are well cho­sen, and eas­ily dis­tin­guish­able. Each player receives his/her own set of hefty and well-printed build­ing tiles in his/her color. The wooden bits are quite ade­quate, as one might expect of any seri­ous Eurogame: black and orange cubes to rep­re­sent coal and iron, respectively.

Photo by Geo

Lastly, I must admit that the rule­book, although well-set typo­graph­i­cally and attrac­tive graph­i­cally, is hor­ri­bly orga­nized. The rules aren’t sim­ple as it is, and the way the rules are orga­nized cer­tainly doesn’t make them any eas­ier. Thank­fully, there are resources avail­able on BoardGameGeek to help clar­ify the rulebook’s shortcomings.

How to play (in a nutshell)

Player order is not seat­ing order, as it is with most games. In Brass, the money play­ers spend is tracked, and the player that spent the least in the pre­vi­ous round is first player in the next round, second-lowest spender = 2nd player, and so on. Thus, the player order will most likely change from round to round. This is a really cool bal­anc­ing mech­a­nism that I wish more games had. You have to watch your spend­ing, because this will affect your order in the next round, and there­fore your choices of which spaces are left avail­able on the board (the early play­ers get first choice of the prime locations).

Another trick is that only the top tile on each of your per­sonal indus­try stacks is avail­able to be built. Typ­i­cally (but not always), the more reward­ing tiles are towards the bot­tom of each stack, so each player has to choose whether to build down through a par­tic­u­lar indus­try, or develop the indus­try (remove tiles off the top).

Photo by Henk Rolleman

The game takes place over two Eras: the Canal Era and the Rail Era, respec­tively. You start with a hand of 8 cards, each of which con­tains either a loca­tion on the board (for exam­ple, the city of Man­ches­ter) or a type of indus­try (cot­ton, coal, iron, port, or ship­yard). Each turn, you will take 2 actions, dis­card a card for each action. At the end of your turn, you draw back up to 8 cards. An Era ends when all play­ers run out of cards (not when the deck is depleted).

As what to do for an action, you may do any of the fol­low­ing five things:

• Take a loan (cash infusion)
• Build a link between cities (canal or rail)
• Build an indus­try in a city (cotton/coal/iron/port/shipyard)
• Develop an indus­try (remove 1 – 2 tiles from the top of your stack(s))
• Sell cot­ton (increase per-round income)

Photo by Henk Rolleman

Here’s the rub: For an indus­try tile you’ve played to be any good, it needs to be used, or flipped. Cot­ton mills and ports can be flipped when a player sells cot­ton. Coal mine and iron works tiles are built with a cer­tain amount of coal or iron sit­ting on them, and get flipped when their respec­tive resources are depleted. When a tile is flipped, it is lit­er­ally turned upside down to reveal the per-round income it will earn you, and how many points it’s worth at scor­ing. You won’t get any income or points for your unflipped (unused) indus­tries, so only build what you think has a chance be used before the end of an Era.

A good rule of thumb is to try to build more of what other play­ers are build­ing less of. The demand will come, and the fewer play­ers you have to share that demand with, all the bet­ter for you!

Scor­ing points

At the end of each Era, there is a round of scor­ing. Play­ers get points for their flipped indus­try tiles and for their links to indus­tri­al­ized cities. After scor­ing the Canal (first) Era, all canal links and level 1 indus­try tiles are removed from the board, leav­ing a par­tially clean board for the begin­ning of the Rail Era.

Else­where

In the inter­est of (rel­a­tive) brevity, I won’t get into any more specifics about the rules here, but War­frog has a down­load­able PDF of the rules, as well as a FAQ page for those that are inter­ested in learn­ing more about how the game works. You’ll also want to check out the rewrit­ten rules on BoardGameGeek after see­ing the offi­cial ones! The BGG forums for Brass are another great resource if you have rules ques­tions, or just want to read what other peo­ple have to say about the game. Finally, BGG has a won­der­ful image gallery of peo­ple play­ing Brass, some of the play­ing pieces, etc. All of the images used in this review are cour­tesy of BGG users.

Photo by Henk Rolleman

The Review

Brass is an absolutely bril­liant game, and I’m thrilled to have the chance to share my thoughts on it. It’s cer­tainly not a sim­ple game, and you’ll prob­a­bly play it wrong on your first attempt (as I did), but I’ve found it to be a true gem after sev­eral plays, and I don’t expect my opin­ion to change any­time soon. Brass shares much in com­mon with old-school rail­road games, but emerges as its own unique experience.

Play­ing Brass actu­ally makes me feel a bit like a 19th-century Eng­lish busi­ness­man. Wal­lace has clearly designed the game to be the­matic. Yes, there are some nig­gly rules excep­tions, but the mechan­ics of Brass are largely refined abstrac­tions of busi­ness processes from the period. Tak­ing into account the geo­graph­i­cal ele­ment, it’s amaz­ing how much com­plex­ity Wal­lace was able to dis­till into a really fun, and rel­a­tively sim­ple game. The game’s soul draws me in.

Brass can be quite con­tentious and cut­throat with 4 play­ers, and slightly less so with 3. With either num­ber, there will always be that deli­cious ten­sion between want­ing to increase your income, score more points, and posi­tion your­self to grab the prime loca­tions on the board, whilst try­ing not to run out of money or have your plans foiled by the other play­ers, all of whom are try­ing to do the same thing. There is a lot going on, and there will always be more you want to do than you are able to do – a sign of a solid and wor­thy game. I highly rec­om­mend Brass to those who like their games meaty and strate­gic, and who don’t mind using their first play or two of Brass to learn how to play it.

If you enjoyed this review and would like to see more of them from me, please let me know in the comments.