I’ve never dreamed of running a coal and beer fuelled canal empire in industrial era England, but the creative team behind Brass: Birmingham decided that the dirty, dark background was the best idea for an award-winning board game, so here we are.

Brass: Birmingham is a 2018 redesign of 2007’s Brass, by game designer Martin Wallace. Gavan Brown and Matt Tolman join Martin Wallace in this redevelopment, published by Roxley. Brass: Birmingham is played over two eras, the Canal era and the Rail era. During each era, players will take actions by playing cards to develop their industries, spend and produce coal and iron, and place their businesses across the board (in their network), while utilizing other players industries to ship their goods, providing income and victory points for everyone involved.

My first experience with Brass: Birmingham really ran against my loss aversion. See, in Brass, taking loans is kind of important. Critical, even. Yes, taking a loan diminishes your income, but having money to build businesses is what earns you more income. But in almost every game I play where loans are an option, I make it my personal goal to stay far away from them. Something about seeing my mom being buried in credit card debt or something, but that’s neither here nor there. Seeing my opponents take the loans, and then catapult into riches, really highlighted to me the nuance of loans here.

I’m a little head of myself, though. Brass is a masterclass in Euro design. Every action, every building feeds into each other. The map is simultaneously open and restrictive. Most of the actions you’ll take will be affected by the card you discard, either which industry you’re allowed to play, or which locale you’re allowed to play into. Many buildings need coal and iron to be built, and players can buy this resource freely from the market, which slowly raises in price as players consume it. But players can also open their own coal and iron mines to feed back into the market, earning them money and potentially perpetual income once the mine has been totally consumed. The real twist here is that anyone can (and sometimes must) consume the resource of an opposing player. But hey, that’s a good thing, you get the resource to build one of your industry tiles, and they get the money and points for providing that resource. It’s positive player interaction, everyone wins, right?

A large part of Brass is developing your network, which is a series of cities connected via one of your canal links. At the end of the first era, every canal link will earn points based on the completed buildings it’s adjacent to, regardless if they were your buildings or your opponents. Then, all the era 1 buildings and canal links are wiped off the board, and players launch into the second era.

The turn order mechanism offers such a great moment of tension. The player who spent the least amount of money gets to go first in the next round. It’s amazing. It allows players to jostle and hold back so they can go earlier in the next round, or let players make some clever plays so they can engineer two turns in a row, giving them 4 back to back actions with no opportunity to interrupt their machinations. I generally have no idea how to play well in Brass: Birmingham, but sometimes, the path forward is obvious. Doing a loan plus building a beer on one turn, then building 4x rails during the next turn, utterly clogging up the rail spots on the board can be wildly lucrative. Other times, you’ll find yourself mired in Brass’s opaque-ness. You might feel like the right answer is to build the early and easy industries, but an experienced player will tell you that you should be developing away your early industries so you can build the more lucrative later ones.

Brass is a game that demands smart, efficient play. You’ll be punished for waste, rewarded for foresight, and constantly on edge, watching the map shift as beer disappears and connections get choked off. It’s a tense, economic knife-fight, and it earns every accolade it gets.

And yet, I’m not totally in love with it. Don’t get me wrong, Brass: Birmingham is brilliant. It’s a heavyweight Euro with teeth and polish. It deserves its spot at the top of BGG. If you consider yourself a serious gamer, you owe it to yourself to play Brass: Birmingham several times. But the more I play it, the more I feel like I’m doing the same thing over and over again. Am I going to be the big coal baron this game, or is Otter going to take that role? Someone has to, it just depends on who is in the best position to build coal on their turn. I’ve read accounts of people who played the original Brass over 100 times, revelling in its tight action economy, and pushing the system to its limits, eking out every last point and proving that mastery is possible (looking at the bell curve on Goodat.Games, the range of scores goes from 49 all the way up to 217). I know there’s a high skill ceiling, but I don’t know if I’m the type of person who is going to plumb the depths of Brass.

Brass: Birmingham is an easy recommend. It’s easy to recommend playing it 10 times. It was number 18 on my top games of all time list, because I recognize just how well designed this game really is. And yet, I have this feeling in my heart that I don’t love it as much as most of the BGG community does. I don’t even have any reason why, I have no real criticisms. It’s a brilliant game, incredibly designed, finely balanced. It deserves all the awards and plaudits that it receives. Perhaps I could nitpick on how simultainously elegent yet cumbersome the rules can be, how obtuse the network mechanic can be to understand, how tedious it is to do a mid-game scoring, then wipe all the level 1 tiles and canal links off the board, and then play the game a second time.

Brass: Birmingham is a game I admire more than I crave. It’s heavy and smart, I’d happily join in a session when my friends request it. It’s tends to be a bit heavy and a bit too opaque for me to really find joy in, which means when it’s my turn to pick the game, Brass: Birmingham does not float to the top of my list.