Brass: Birmingham

Brass: Birmingham deserves its reputation as one of the tightest economic engines in the hobby, and I say that as someone who came in skeptical of another entry in the increasingly crowded “network builder with a resource economy” genre. The two-era structure, Canal into Rail, functions almost like two different games back to back, and the amount of pre-planning that pays off two turns later is the best kind of satisfying, the kind where a smart move doesn’t feel obvious until it’s already worked.

I need to say something about the components that I don’t think gets said enough. The board art won board-art awards and I genuinely do not understand why. Cities are visually stacked on top of each other at a resolution that makes it hard to tell at a glance whether a link is going to Redditch or Gloucester, and the whole palette leans so muddy that I’ve caught myself squinting to confirm ownership on a tile I placed two turns ago. It’s a real problem in a game this dependent on reading the board state accurately.

Beer is the mechanic nobody explains well enough up front, and there’s a specific moment every new player at my table hits, usually somewhere in round three, where they suddenly understand that beer is the actual currency the whole rail era runs on and coal was just a warm-up resource. Once that clicks, the whole back half of the game reorganizes in your head. The reminder cards don’t help as much as they should either, the iconography is scattered enough across different card types that I’ve had to backtrack mid-turn more than once to figure out which symbol I’d missed.

None of that touches the core loop, which is as good as advertised, tense, interlocking, and genuinely different every session depending on card draws and turn order. Five stars for the game underneath, filed alongside a real note that the presentation is working against new players more than a game this acclaimed should allow.