Let me be honest with you: your first game of Brass: Birmingham will probably be terrible.
Not the game itself - the game is extraordinary. But your experience of it? Confusing, frustrating, and almost certainly full of rules you got wrong. You’ll finish your first play with a nagging sense that you did something illegal in round three, that the scoring made no sense, and that maybe the 83,000+ people who own this thing are all sharing one massive delusion.
They’re not. Brass: Birmingham is the #1 ranked game on BoardGameGeek for a reason. But it takes at least three plays to understand why.
The Bad First Impression
Brass: Birmingham’s first-play problems are well documented. One reviewer put it perfectly: “Through all three of our sessions, we discovered mid-game that we’d been misplaying something significant. Sometimes multiple things.” That’s not a failure of intelligence - it’s a consequence of how the game is designed.
The individual rules are logical. Cards determine where you build. Resources flow through networks. Beer enables sales. The canal era wipes the board and transitions to rails. Each rule, in isolation, makes thematic sense. Coal from connected mines. Iron from anywhere (because iron was shipped nationally). Beer as a lubricant for commerce.
But collectively? They create a web of interlocking exceptions that’s almost impossible to hold in your head on the first pass. Here’s a partial list of things new players routinely get wrong:
- The network rule - you can only build in locations connected to your existing network, but your first build of the game can go anywhere
- Resource consumption - coal and iron can come from opponent’s tiles (flipping them and giving them points), or from the market, but beer works differently
- One build per city in the canal era - except this restriction lifts entirely in the rail era
- Overbuilding - you can replace your own tiles with higher-level ones, but opponent’s tiles? Only coal mines and ironworks, and only when the resource market is empty
- The canal wipe - all level 1 industries and all canal links get removed between eras, which feels devastating if you weren’t prepared
Any one of these misplays can cascade through an entire game. The result is that your first “complete” game of Brass was almost certainly not a legal game of Brass.
When It Clicks: Play Three
Image: Roxley Games
The turning point isn’t play two. Play two is where you stop making illegal moves (mostly) but still can’t see the strategy. You understand what each action does, but not why you’d choose one over another. You’re reacting to your card hand instead of planning around it.
Play three is where Brass: Birmingham transforms.
Suddenly you can see the supply chain. You realise that building a coal mine isn’t about the coal - it’s about the income bump when it flips, and the network connection it creates for your pottery works next turn. You start understanding why turn order matters so desperately - why sometimes spending less to go first is worth more than the action you’d take with that money.
The eureka moment usually involves the sell action. When you first grasp the chain - build a manufactured good, ensure beer is available (maybe from an opponent’s brewery, connected through your rail network), sell to flip the tile, score points AND gain income - the whole game opens up. You start seeing three-move sequences instead of individual actions.
As one BGG reviewer described it: “The process of learning, getting confused, then everything clicking and finally understanding Brass is a wonderful experience.”
Why the Pain Is Worth It
The Interaction
This is what separates Brass from every other heavy euro. Other players aren’t just competing for spaces - they’re part of your supply chain. When an opponent builds a coal mine, that coal is your resource too, if you’re connected. Using it flips their tile, giving them points and income. This creates a beautiful tension: helping yourself often helps your opponents, and vice versa.
Beer is the crunchiest example. Breweries produce barrels that anyone connected can use. Building a brewery is an investment in the whole table’s economy, not just yours. Timing when to brew, when to use others’ beer, and when to let the supply run dry is where the real strategic depth lives.
The Rhythm
The two-era structure is secretly the best thing about the game. The canal era is your warm-up - establish your economic engine, flip some tiles for income, build connections. Then the board wipes and the rail era begins, faster and more expensive. Everything you learned in the first half informs your second-half strategy, but you can’t just repeat it. Rail links cost coal. Level 2+ industries are more powerful but pricier. The tempo shifts dramatically.
Mid-game scoring between eras also helps enormously. Knowing where you stand relative to other players after the canal era creates natural tension for the second half. You’re either chasing or defending, and both feel meaningful.
The Decisions
Brass: Birmingham has exactly six actions. That’s it. Build, Network, Sell, Develop, Loan, Scout. The genius is that every single one involves a genuine trade-off. Taking a loan drops your income. Developing removes tiles you’ll never build but advances you to stronger ones. Scouting costs three cards for two wilds. Nothing is free, nothing is obvious.
And yet - crucially - the decisions aren’t paralysing once you understand the game. Analysis paralysis in Brass comes from not understanding the strategy, not from too many choices. As players gain experience, games flow faster. A four-player game can genuinely wrap in 90 minutes with experienced players, despite the 120-minute estimate on the box.
The Numbers
Here’s what BGG says about Brass: Birmingham:
- BGG Rating: 8.57/10
- BGG Rank: #1 Overall
- Weight: 3.86/5 (heavy, but not the heaviest)
- Players: 2-4 (best with 3-4)
- Play Time: 60-120 minutes
- Year: 2018
- Designer: Gavan Brown, Matt Tolman, Martin Wallace
That weight rating of 3.86 is notable. It’s heavy, yes, but it’s not a wargame. It’s not an 18xx. The complexity comes from interlocking systems rather than raw rule count. The rulebook is actually quite short - which is part of the problem, because it doesn’t adequately convey just how much depth those compact rules generate.
Who This Game Still Isn’t For
Not everyone will love Brass: Birmingham, even after three plays. Be honest with yourself:
- If you hate economic games - Brass is pure economics. There’s no combat, no narrative, no hidden information beyond your card hand. If supply and demand doesn’t excite you, three plays won’t change that.
- If your group can’t commit to multiple sessions - The ROI on Brass requires at least 3 plays, ideally with the same group. If your gaming time is too scarce for repeated plays, you’ll never get past the confusion phase.
- If you play mostly at 2 players - Brass works at 2, but the interaction that makes it special is diminished. The supply-demand tension needs 3-4 players to really sing.
- If rules overhead kills your fun - Some players enjoy the discovery phase of a complex game. Others find it exhausting. If you need to enjoy a game from minute one, Brass will test your patience.
The Rescue Plan
If you bounced off Brass: Birmingham, here’s how to get back on the horse:
Watch a video, don’t just read the rules. The rulebook is functional but sparse. A 20-minute teach video will clarify more than re-reading the rulebook three times.
Play the canal era as a tutorial. Accept that your first era will be messy. Focus on understanding the build-network-sell chain rather than optimising. The canal era wipes anyway - treat it as a learning round.
Focus on one strategy. Don’t try to understand everything at once. Pick manufactured goods (cotton mills or pottery) and focus the entire game on building, connecting, and selling those. Ignore the rest of the economy until you’ve mastered one production chain.
Keep a cheat sheet handy. The key exceptions - where coal vs iron come from, the overbuilding rules, what disappears between eras - should be written down and visible. Don’t rely on memory for edge cases.
Play at three players. Two is too quiet. Four can be overwhelming for learners. Three is the sweet spot for your comeback game.
The Verdict
Brass: Birmingham is the rare game that earns its reputation but doesn’t reveal it easily. Your first play will almost certainly be marred by rule misunderstandings, strategic confusion, and the uncomfortable feeling that you’re missing something fundamental.
You are. And finding it is one of the most rewarding experiences in modern board gaming.
Give it three plays. If the economic puzzle still doesn’t grab you after that, fair enough - walk away knowing you gave BGG’s #1 a genuine shot. But I suspect that somewhere in play two or three, you’ll feel it: the moment where the interlocking gears of canal-era industry suddenly make sense, and you’ll understand why 83,000 people haven’t just bought this game but rated it higher than any other game in existence.
That’s not a delusion. That’s Brass: Birmingham.
