Brass: Birmingham

I’ve read the complaints about the board being too dark to read in a dim room and I can’t argue with them, the whole thing sits in shades of black and it genuinely gets hard to tell one player’s cubes from another’s once the lamp isn’t pointed straight down at it. Play this somewhere with real light over the table or you’ll be squinting at location banners that all blur together. That’s the one real production knock, everything else about Brass: Birmingham is close to a perfectly designed game and I don’t say that about much.

The thing that gets me every time is the timing. You’re never just planning your own turn, you’re reading the market, reading what everyone else needs, and deciding whether to build now or wait a round for a price to shift in your favor. Money is tight enough the whole game that no action feels wasted, and once you understand the difference between what’s linked and what’s actually in your network the whole system goes smooth as anything. The old rulebook used to be genuinely bad by every account I’ve read, the new one fixed that, so don’t let a secondhand copy with the old booklet scare you off.

Beer as a resource for selling still strikes some people as a thin excuse mechanically, tea or beer as one review put it, and I get the complaint, but I don’t think it hurts the game the way people say it does, it’s one more thing to route through your network and that’s the whole appeal of this design anyway. The deluxe iron clay chips are nice to look at and stack cleanly for tracking spend, but if you already own poker chips for something else, save your money, they don’t change how the game plays.

This is a top shelf game for anyone who wants real interaction instead of four people quietly doing their own thing at the same table.