Do you like industrialism? Boardgames? Ruthless capitalism? Then Brass: Birmingham might be the game for you!

About the "Pay it to the face!"

This is something that we have to say every 5 minutes or so because of one of the rules. Every time you pay for something, you stack your coins on your Player Token to keep track of spending (you can see this in the upper left area of the picture).

It's pretty easy to forget this, hence the line 😅.

Look at all this industry

We have:

🔨 Coal mines
⚙️ Iron smelters
🏭 Factories
📦 Shipments
🏺 A Clay Kiln... building
🍺 BEER

All these fun tokens sit on your player board, representing your industrial potential. Getting them on the board is important, but even more important is getting them flipped over to their payout side.

Of course, there are cards!

You always have a hand of 8 cards, unless it's near the end of the round. Play a card(s), draw back up to 8.

Cards determine where you can place your stuff. You either have to match the city you want to play in, or you can match the industry symbol and build anywhere that your network reaches.

Taking any action costs a card—and as such the cards act as the phase timer. Once they run out, the phase ends too.

How the game works

This is a pretty complex one. There's lots going on, and a bunch of niggly little rules that will probably take at least two learning games to really absorb (see: "Pay it to the face!")

But, in essence:

🏗️ Build industry! Get your board tokens out there. They are worth points when flipped. You need to pay certain resources and have the right cards.
🚂 Build the network! In phase one, you connect cities with boats on canals. In phase two, you use trains. Earn points for each flipped industry your network tiles touch (you can score off other people's industries).
💰 Manage resources, collectively. You all have your own money, but resources like beer, coal, and iron appear collectively on the map. Access is communal-ish. Coal needs to be accessible via a network. Iron can be taken from anywhere. You can access your own beer from anywhere, but need network access for someone else's. This aspect of the game is where most of the wacky fun comes from. Oh, and there's also a market that buys/sells depending on... things.
📈 Flip your tiles. A tile flips when it has been successfully depleted or shipped. Resource tiles (coal, iron, beer) go out onto the board and generate the number of resources printed on them. When you or others use all of them, it flips. Shipping goods requires that you're connected to the right market, and that you spend a beer (anyone's).

Other actions include:

💸 Get a loan! Instantly get a bunch of cash, but you will go down on the passive income thingie. Passive is critical in the mid to late game.
🔭 Scout. Burn a card to turn two cards into wilds. A tricksy move, but a clutch one at times.
📐 Develop. Allows you to burn tiles off your player board. There's a certain order in which you can play them, so it's often a good thing to get crappier tiles out of the way so you can build juicier ones.

Strategy

Image credit: bbg user d0gb0t

There are so many ways to play this game out. You could focus on getting a killer network and not worry about building too many things. You could try and be a coal baron so everyone uses your coal when they ramp up to bigger industries.

In the game we most recently played (top picture) Purple won by a long shot (game score counter is along the edge).

They rushed building iron first, and used their own iron to do some some strategic developing. They got some strong tiles onto the board in phase one and scored them twice (some tiles do that if you get them built early enough). They also managed to corner the beer cities in the north with good scouting. So they have access to private beer which let them ship much more easily that the others.

Orange played the network game (tons of trains!) but it wasn't quite enough.

This is heavy one, with lots of little mechanics that take a while to master. Oh yeah, it's also a sequel! I've not played the first Brass, so I can't compare, but the boys at Shut Up & Sit Down have you covered in their full review: