Brass Birmingham

Brass: Birmingham is, by every measurable standard, the best board game ever made. It holds BGG Rank #1, carries an 8.56 average rating from nearly 60,000 voters, and packs a 3.86 weight that rewards players who actually want to think hard for two hours. You’re a competing industrialist in 1770-1870 Birmingham, building cotton mills, coal mines, iron works, and canals - then tearing it all up and doing it again in the rail era. The hand management is elegant, the resource chain is punishing in the best way, and every move ripples outward in ways you only fully appreciate after losing to someone who built beer earlier than you. ...

Fair warning: 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. ...