Board Gaming - Brew Crafters

Brew Crafters

This is another worker placement game, this time with the focus on running a craft brewery. You need to collect resources and turn them into various types of beer. Upgrading your facilities to help you earn more money or produce more beer, or just different types of beer. Hiring specialists that enable you to do special actions, like trading certain goods for certain other goods, or just gaining additional resources when you get others.

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^{and overhead while setup was still happening, as well as instruction on how to play. In the middle of the image shows the specialists (left), the main board (center) that tracks seasons, and has all the worker placement locations, as well as the brewery actions where brewing and research happens, and the 9 types of beer that can be brewed (right)}

There is quite a bit to this game, and I really didn't get it until I'd already run off on a different direction. One of those games where I had a crazy amount of fun losing spectacularly.

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^{player boards. The left one shows 4 tracks of research you can partake in. The right board is the actual brewery with 7 resources above it (the cubes) and 1 beer in production (token lower left). There is also 2 specialists tucked under the right side that provided me with more cubes. Also not the beer shaped first player marker}

One of the difficulties I had with the game was understanding when and what you pay for, which led to a significant deficit at the first payment timing. I also didn't really put together when and what you got paid for until after I'd got through a couple of rounds, which led to the significant shortfall of money.

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^{With only 13 placement options, it can get quite crowded in a 4 player game}

There's lots of decisions to make in the game, and choosing between lots of cheap brews, or less higher quality brews is certainly an important decision to make early in the game, as if you're going to produce a lot, you need to purchase the upgrades to push out more product. There are so many upgrades though that they can get a little overwhelming, so for my first game I decided to completely ignore all of them. If I were to play this again (and I wouldn't say no to it), I'd probably look into at least a couple of the upgrades to store more ingredients (you start with 12 capacity, which can be quite restrictive) and possibly to produce more, now that I understand how the brewing process actually works.