Many newcomers just getting into *Brass: Birmingham* always think this is a serious industrial abacus game about who can dig more coal and smelt more iron. But as long as you sit at a table with a few veterans who've played twenty or thirty games, you'll discover: the essence of this game isn't the Industrial Revolution at all—it's "freeloading" and "anti-freeloading."
The thing that confuses newcomers the most is that omnipresent "beer." In this game, the cotton you painstakingly spin and the pottery you fire—if you want to sell them for points and money, you must consume a barrel of beer; when the Railway Era comes and you want to lay double track, you have to pour in another barrel of beer. But the game's most brutal rule is: your own beer must be connected by your transport network for you to drink it; but someone else's beer—as long as your railway or canal connects to their brewery, you can actually take it and drink it for free! You don't even have to pay them a single cent!
So scenes like this, which absolutely mess with your mind, often appear on the table: You painstakingly spend an action and pay to build a brewery, happily placing two golden barrels of beer on the factory, planning to make a big sale next turn. But before your turn even comes around, the next player casually plays a merchant factory card, follows your railway line, and lightly drinks all two barrels of beer in your factory—gulp gulp gulp—completely dry! The most infuriating part is, he even smiles at you sincerely: "Thanks bro, your beer just helped me flip two cotton mills—next time I'll treat you to bubble tea." At that moment, looking at the empty brewery, you really want to flip the table on the spot.
And this game has another setting specifically designed to torment neat freaks—"loans." In ordinary board games, borrowing money often costs you big points, but in Birmingham, if you don't borrow thirty bucks at the start, you can't even lay out your basic setup. Experts start borrowing frantically from the first round, smashing their income track straight into the negatives, relying entirely on bold canal construction to seize core hubs.
On the surface it's the world's number-one hardcore heavy strategy game, but at its core it's a scheming arena of old capitalists in foggy England fleecing each other, riding each other's railways, and stealing each other's beer.
When you usually play Birmingham, are you the self-sufficient type who brews your own beer and drinks it yourself, or the street bully who camps out next to someone else's brewery to mooch drinks?
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