Polished Brass?

It's not every day that you get to play one of the Top 10 games (according to Board Game Geek) for the very first time. But I got exactly that when I recently played #3, Brass: Birmingham. Of course, expectations on a game rated this highly are impossibly high, and perhaps even more for this game than most. #1 and #2 are Gloomhaven and Pandemic Legacy: Season One, a campaign and legacy game respectively, which makes Brass: Birmingham the highest-rated "single session" board game there is.

Brass: Birmingham (a sequel to an earlier game, Brass: Lancashire) is a game about building a manufacturing network in the Industrial Revolution. You pay to claim routes between cities, use supply lines to make deliveries, and buy and sell commodities. There have been many other board games playing in a similar space, both mechanically and thematically, which only increases the already high expectations.

Needless to say, that puts special emphasis on the aspects of the game that are different from others I've played (or at least, other "network building" games I've played). First is a system of generating and spending resources that's so cutthroat, it's diabolical. When a player constructs a building of a certain type in one of their cities, a quantity of one of the game's resources is placed on it. But any player with a route connected to that city can spend that resource, and they don't need your permission.

Using up all the resources in one of your buildings is how you score points... but you might have particular empire-building plans for the resources you create, plans that will absolutely be thwarted by your opponents. Every time you construct a building, your turn ends, and each opponent gets the chance to spend its resources before play comes back around to you. So the game is a devilish balance of isolation and encroachment, of making plans but also keeping ready to pounce on sudden opportunities.

This mechanic meshes well with another one in the game: the way that turn order is selected each round. Whoever spends the least money in one round goes first in the next (while the player who spends the most goes last). Acting last, letting every opponent play before you, is a real sacrifice. But is it enough of a sacrifice to not build your empire as best you can by spending a bunch of money this round? Can you maybe chain together a clever pair of rounds by going last in one round, setting up a golden opportunity, but spending the least money so that you can go first next round and play back to back? It feels like a very deep puzzle you can spend many plays trying to crack.

Another big wrinkle in the game that you don't fully appreciate your first time through is a major "halftime" reset of the board. Midway through the game, the vast majority of the early buildings that players create are cleared away. Paths connecting cities are lost, the points everyone was earning disappear, and you have to start over... not quite from square one (particularly if you've had an eye toward this halfway point the entire time), but enough to really gut a smoothly running strategy you may have set up.

This reset is so extreme, in fact, that it might slow down the game a little too much. It's quite possible that lack of familiarity was a major factor here, but it seemed as through the first "half" of the game was really more like the first "third" of the game; even though players took the same number of turns before and after, play went much more slowly in the back half. Just when everyone was feeling like, "okay, I understand this," we all found out that we really did not. It was both tantalizing for what future plays could bring, but also a bit disheartening in how a deep-thinking game that had actually kept a brisk pace suddenly bogged down in an unexpected way.

Also -- and this may not matter for many gamers -- the story and visuals for this game leave something to be desired. Brass: Birmingham is a dark game. The player mats are dark, the pieces are dark, the game board is super dark. And that's all even before you flip over to the "nighttime" sides of all the boards, a purely cosmetic shift that makes everything darker still. I suppose it's supposed to be evocative of the time period (or at least, or modern conception of it) for everything to be so leeched of color and drab, but it's awfully oppressive to look at for one to two hours.

And don't try to make logical sense of the gameplay. Spending two of the game's three goods -- coal and beer -- requires a network of canals or railways connecting to a city; the third resource -- iron -- just moves anywhere. (The rulebook's hand-waving justification of this feels half-hearted at best.) Every sale you make in the game is apparently done over drinks in a pub, because you have to have beer to close the deal. When trains are invented, everybody apparently forgets how to use canals; that's the "halftime" point when all existing networks are inexplicably destroyed. It all works great from a mechanical standpoint, but if you're the sort of gamer who needs a story closely tied to the gameplay, Brass: Birmingham will leave you flummoxed.

Overall, I did enjoy the game. In particular, I enjoyed it a good deal more than other games that are judged to be of similar complexity by the gamer community (my own tastes usually falling more in the middle of the spectrum, by Board Game Geek standards). I think Brass: Birmingham a game that gets good strategic mileage out of its complexity, where other games often just feel complicated for the sake of coming off as a "gamer's game." On the other hand, I have played games that are easier to wrap your head around that do scratch a similar itch; Medieval Merchant is a good one that comes to mind. (Though I haven't played that in an age; perhaps it only seemed great at the time?)

I'd say Brass: Birmingham deserves a B+, with the possibility of rising were we to play it more. I also will be checking out its predecessor, Brass: Lancashire (also highly regarded) to see how similar/different it is.