Brass
Martin Wallace
Warfrog
3-4 players
2-3 hours, with the potential to go long
Brass is <PERSON> most recent economic game, this time taking us to the beginning of the industrial revolution in England. Taking place in Lancashire, players must build factories, mines, canals, and railroads in an attempt to build an industrial empire.
Foundations of Empire
As a budding industrialist, each player has five categories of industries that he or she can build: coal mines, textile factories, ports, shipbuilders, and metallurgists (who produce iron). For each category you have a stack of tiles, with low-tech ones on the top and high-tech ones on the bottom. You work your way through the pile from low-tech to high-tech either by simply building stuff, or doing research to remove tiles from the top of a stack (one industry, shipbuilding, has two unbuildable tiles on top, so the only way to build these at all is to first do research).
You build these tiles on a map of Lancashire. The board has cities, including central hubs like Liverpool and Manchester, as well as less well-known cities like Colne. Each city has spaces for one to four industries, and each space has an icon telling you what can be built there (often a choice of two industry types, but frequently just one).
In the beginning, the players build a network of canals to connect the cities. Then halfway through the game, there is a transition to the age of rails. This triggers a round of scoring, and all the canals are wiped out, along with the lowest tech level of industries, and we start again, this time connecting the cities with a network of rails. The two networks are slightly different, with some connections available in the rail age that weren’t available in the canal age.
In order to fill the board, you start out with £30 and a hand of cards that represent business opportunities in the various industries. The cards are of two types: ones with specific cities, that permit you to build any industry that city allows if there is space, or ones with specific industries, that allow you to build an industry of that type in any city which allows an industry of that type and is connected to your current network by your own canals or rails. If this sounds confusing, it is, although you get used to it after a game or two.
Each turn you have two actions, and each action requires either playing or discarding a card. 792
The most visible actions will be either to play one of these cards to add industries to the game, or discard one to extend your transport network. However, you can also discard a card to take out a loan, sell textiles produced in your factories, or do industrial research to allow the placement better industries.
When you play a card and pony up some cash to place an industry initially, it gets you nothing. In order to earn money and/or victory points you have to develop the tile, and the way in which this works is slightly different for each industry.
Economic Rules?
So for example, when you build a coal mine, it comes with two units of coal (as you become higher-tech, it’ll come with more). Before the coal mine earns you anything, the coal needs to be used. Various other game activities require coal: railways require coal to build, as do some textile mills and metallurgists. If anyone wants to build one of these things, and there is a connection from their building site to your coal mine, they just take the coal – they don’t pay, you can’t refuse them, and you don’t get anything out of it, yet. The player(s) who built the railways or canals that provide the connections also get nothing, yet. When your coal mine is finally exhausted, it will flip over, and then it will start earning you money each turn, as well has having a VP value which will score at the end of the age. Metallurgists work almost the same way: some high-tech textile mills and coal mines require iron to build and doing research requires iron. Oddly, railways require no iron, and neither does iron require transportation the way coal does. Once their iron is used, metallurgists will tend to provide less revenue than coal mines, but will be worth more VPs (often significantly more) come scoring. For the builders of the railways or canals, transportation never makes any money, but at the end of the age it does earn victory points based on the density of nearby industry.
Ports and textile mills have a different, symbiotic relationship. 792