What felt like exceptions or special circumstances becomes second nature and intuitive. In the end, like with any game, once you've played it once or twice, things start to flow really quickly and you're starting to get a feeling for where your victory points come from. So, don't be put off by the rules complexity. The very first time you play, the canal era alone will probably take as long as playing the whole game once you're a bit more experienced. Yet, on your first game you only want to play the first era, so you can ease yourself in. It feels very overwhelming, but the game tries to help you.īrass: Birmingham is played over two eras: the canal era and the rail era. There is a lot of terminology to learn, the behaviour of the cards and industry to understand and the sheer amount of tiles on your own player mat to grapple with.
It also matters what resource you produce or consume, because each one works slightly differently. There are also things like your network and whether you're connected to something else to consider. The card you discard defines where you can build and what you can build. The turn order itself is actually relatively simple, consisting of discarding a card and taking an action, then drawing up again, and pretty most of what you do during the game is either build an industry or a network link - but the devil is in the detail of course. A large chunk of its complexity comes from the sheer number of rules. We intended to teach the third person in our group during our next online games night, so investing half an hour going over rules together seemed a very worthwhile effort.īrass: Birmingham, like its sibling Brass: Lancashire, which in turn is a reprint of the original Brass, is rules-heavy. However, one week it was just the two of us and we decided we were happy to learn the rules together and just go for it. We had spoken about playing Brass: Birmingham for a couple of weeks, but none of us had had the time to learn the rules, ready to teach the others. I felt that over the years we had tackled more and more complex games and that now we were finally ready to go up to the next level of complexity.Ĭonvincing the others actually turned out not to be too difficult, because after having moved our weekly meetings to an online world, we had discovered more games on the various platforms and were happy to try out new things, provided one of us would learn the rules. It took me a long time to pluck up the courage and suggest to my weekly games group that we should try Brass: Birmingham. When a game is celebrated as being complex, your first instinct is to be intimidated. With that out of the way, let's move to the actual review. That's why this article comes under the heading of "Digital Eyes", which are reviews of games I only played online. This review is based on digital plays of the game only. Yet, overall you had done well and were certainly top Brass: Birmingham by Roxley Games. But then, nobody could have predicted the Industrial Revolution to be so transformative as it had been. Maybe if you had been more careful and had planned further ahead when you first started out as an entrepreneur, things would have worked out differently. Investing in the rail network would have been much more lucrative and sensible, but you had wanted to compete with your contemporaries. Looking back, building that last pottery had been foolhardy.
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