Brass Birmingham

[LennyLen]

Any Brass players here?  What's your favourite strategy?

I won a 3 player game last night by focusing early on coal, iron and beer while my opponents concentrated on other industries, and were regularly flipping my tiles for me. This gave me an early income lead which I used to fund a massive canal network. I followed the same general plan for the rail era, but did buy and flip a few other industries. I used the money I accumulated in the first half to do several turns where for both actions I did a double railway which also allowed me to flip a lot of my own coal and beer tiles.

[Mr. Analog]

This looks complicated to me haha

[LennyLen]

It's actually not that complicated.  If you look at the photo of the board below, I've circled some locations in green. The main idea behind this game is to build industries and sell (called flipping because you flip the tile for the industry over) them.  The green locations are where industries can be sold (and also where coal can be bought).

You get dealt cards that either have a location on them, or an industry.  If you play a location card it allows you to play an industry tile on that location (different locations have different industries). If you play an industry card you can play a matching industry tile on any location connected to your network.  It takes either coal or iron to place industry tiles though, so you need to build these first. And you also need access to beer in order to sell goods, so you need to play these tiles too. You can also place connections between locations - canals in the first half of the game, railways in the second.

At the end of each half of the game you do a scoring round where you get points for how many industry tiles you've flipped and how big your network is. The rules of how networks work, and whose coal, iron, and beer you consume first (when these tiles become empty (they start with coal, iron and beer tokens placed on them) they get flipped like you other industry tiles) can seem a bit complex at first, but you go over them pretty much each turn so you pick them up fast.

It doesn't sound like much of a fun concept for a game, and when I saw that it was the number 1 ranked game on BoardGameGeeks I was quite surprised, but I bought it anyway, and it really does deserve it's position. It's an incredibly fun game. One of the things I like about it's flexible.  You can have people ruin your masterplan and still come back from it and win by taking a different angle.

[Melbosa]

I play Brass... I own it and love it!

[Melbosa]

I actually have 3D printed all the boats, trains, and money to upgrade my set.

[LennyLen]

I actually have 3D printed all the boats, trains, and money to upgrade my set.

Got any pics of them?