This review is based on the Board Game Arena implementation.
If I had a nickel for every time a board game about making board games came out, I’d have 2 nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s odd that it happened twice in such a short time frame. The first to hit crowdfunding was Tabletop Incin March of 2024. That game was originally called Meeple Inc, but had to change their name after receiving a cease and desist letter from Hans Im Gluck claiming they own the rights to the term Meeple. I’m not sure how that case ever really shook out, but it felt like a pretty ridiculous claim to make.
But this post is about The Game Makers. Unlike Tabletop Inc, The Game Makers reached out to hundreds of board game publishers and secured the rights to use their games assets in their own game about making games. The theme here is that you are a board game publisher, and you spend your actions sending forklifts all over your warehouse collecting the resources needed to make these games. Wood, plastics, cardboard, dice, you name it. But what makes The Game Makers feel magical for the hobbyist board gamer is that every card is a real life game. Almost certainly your favourite game is included (although a healthy amount are being locked behind a Kickstarter Exclusive paywall), and the love you feel for your favourite game is certainly going to give you good vibes towards this one, as well.
There is no denying there’s a thrill when you flip over a card and recognize the box art. Perhaps for even just a moment you’ll be transported to some of your favourite gaming moments, playing that game with your loved ones 10 years ago. Maybe you’ll see games you haven’t thought of in years, the games that brought you into the hobby! The Game Makers is billing itself as a celebration of the industry itself. A homage stitched together from hundreds of real, licensed games whose box covers show up on the cards you draw and manufacture.
And that effort, the hundreds of contracts that publisher Bezier games had to draft and get signed, is the magic that sets The Game Makers apart from any other mid-weight economic Euro game. You’re not just collecting cubes of different colours to complete recipes. You’re not sifting through abstract icons and terms, you’re cataloguing and building your own collection, offering flashes of nostalgia at every turn.
The game mechanics itself, designed by Ben Rosset, who also designed Fromage and Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig, features a massive rondel, ringed with resources and opportunities. Your workers are miniature forklifts that you’ll shuttle around the wheel. Wherever you choose to land them, they’ll scoop up resources: wood, cardboard, plastic, dice, or cards. Every resource pulls double duty, they’re all used to build the cards that will ultimately earn you points to win the game, but they can all also be used to improve your factory, or increase your marketing. The cards can be either the game you’re trying to build, or a resource to pay to build a different game.
This is where The Game Makers shines. Every turn brings a little agony. Do I try to complete this beloved game and put it on my shelf, or break it down for parts to chase something else? You need to make that choice for every resource, each time you take something, you’re pulled in two directions.
Not only do you have to decide how to use each of the resources, but each resource has 3 levels to it. Obtaining the higher level resources requires you to send your forklifts further around the rondel, meaning it’ll take more turns until you get to use that worker again. It’s a great puzzle that kept me engaged for the entire play.
All that said, some decisions beg to be questioned. The production looks enormous, plastic forklifts, oversized plastic rondel, piles of manufactured wood and plastic bits, the Kickstarter itself boasts “over 700 premium components”, and the irony is hard to ignore when the game itself includes a “Go Green” scoring path of planting trees to make your factory more environmentally conscious. It sure looks spectacular in the advertising photos, but it also feels like a game that could have done more with less.
And commenting on the epic scale of the production swings me around to the price. I don’t usually comment on the cost of a game unless it’s particularly noteworthy. A copy of The Game Makers will set you back $208CAD ($150USD). The complete edition costs an eye watering $277CAD ($199USD). I know I won’t pony up that kind of cash for any game, no matter how charming the theme may be.
I guess the theme brings up another question. The diary of its creation reveals a story of passion: hundreds of publishers collaborating, big and small, to make this tribute to the hobby possible. But at the table, it doesn’t always feel like a love letter to board gaming. Instead, it comes across more of a love letter to board game manufacturing. The model of a game as “components in a box plus a shelf-scoring bonus” is satisfying when you can get synergies, and I can’t think of a better way to incorporate all these different games, but it reduces all of these games to abstractions of their raw components. If you think of Carcassonne as Sunday afternoons with family, reducing it to “level 3 tiles and level 2 wooden bits” feels flat. The abstraction works mechanically, but emotionally, it doesn’t land.
As a simulation as a board game producer, it’s quite flat. There’s no currency, so all the resources are free, You don’t need to grapple with the questions of how many of each game to print, or faff about with distribution, find prototypes, liaise with designers, respond to community feed back, nothing. I’m not saying that I need an event that says “you massively underestimated how many copies of Wingspanyou’ll need, now the public is accusing you of artificially keeping supply low to drive hype and demand”, but considering this is called “a love letter to board games”, it is a bit disappointing that no other aspect of the board gaming hobby is represented here.
Gameplay-wise, Ben Rosset pedigree has already proven himself to be a competent designer, and The Game Makers is another star on his hat. Deceptively simple turns, resource gathering that makes you struggle with your decisions, and simultaneous play that keeps the flow moving, it all works really well. The Game Makers is approachable, despite its table presence, it’s a pretty great design! But I do suspect that the core gameplay loop will feel repetitive after the initial wonder seeing your favourite games on the cards wears off.
And for me, that was the main draw of The Game Makers. The first thrill of drawing a card and seeing your favourite games. I’ll confess that in my plays I’ve been swayed more by wanting to build my favourite games, than by building the games that would score me the post points. The Game Makers is a great design, it’s clever and playful. But with that price tag, it’s obvious it’s not for me.
The more I played The Game Makers, the more I felt the theme was less a love-letter, and more a self indulgent testament to unchecked consumerism. This is a game for that board game fan who has hundreds of games, dozens of which are still in their shrinkwrap and are unplayed. For that enthusiast who goes to board game conventions and buys the 30 hottest games, because they can’t stomach the FOMO of waiting a few months for wider distribution. It’s a game for those who are willing to drop $300 on a Kickstarter, even while they have 8 projects outstanding. And that’s not the kind of board gamer that I am.
I do think The Game Makers will be an exciting toy for hobbyists who want to see their shelves reflected back at them in cardboard form. I can’t deny that every card flip is a dopamine hit, nor will I deny that the core gameplay loop is pretty solid. Just don’t expect The Game Makers to be truly representative of the hobby that you’ve put so much time and money into, nor does it tell the personal story of why these games matter. I do enjoy the game, I’ll happily play it again, and will probably rope my friends into playing it on BGA in the future. But I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone pony up that much cash for any board game, let alone this one.
My Island was the hotly anticipated 2023 follow-up to 2020’s eminently popular My City, both games designed by Reiner Knizia and published by KOSMOS. This review was 2 years in the making, as my first game of My Island was on October 28th, 2023, and the final game was August 9th, 2025. There were some significant gaps in time between games, which probably tells you how this review is going to end.
Just like in My City, My Island is played over 24 games, broken into 8 chapters. Each game introduces new rules that twist the game in different and interesting ways. The gameplay itself is similar, every player has the same pieces available to them. Each turn, a card is flipped, and all players need to fit the piece depicted on the card into their personal player board. My Island features a series of hexagon tiles that need to be placed in a dominos style; each tile you put down needs to have at least one hexagon touching another hexagon of the same type.
The tiles come in 2, 3, and 4 hexagon shapes, with the same element rarely doubled within a single tile. At the start of the campaign, you can only place your tiles on the beach, but as the campaign goes on, you gain the ability to adventure deeper into the jungle. Where you put your tile is up to you, within the placement rules, but efficiency is the name of the game. Clusters and connections score you points, while awkward gaps and poor planning come back to bite you.
My Island is 8 chapters long, each chapter broken into 3 episodes each. Every chapter brings in a new twist, perhaps some new pieces, or something gets placed on your player board, while each episode within the chapter offers a small change on the chapter quirk. Sometimes these twists add tension, but other times it’s just confusing, especially when a rule changes a rule from a previous chapter, but the rulebook says “all rules from previous chapters apply”. It didn’t help that each chapter would introduce 3 or 4 new rules, then each episode in that chapter would twist only one or two of those rules, making it really difficult to keep in your mind what still scored and what didn’t. In the end, we just ended up using the chapter scoring summary as our definitive list of what rules still apply.
As the list of rules grew, so did the opportunities to earn points. As I said, you have to place tiles ‘dominos style’. By that, I mean when you place a tile, at least one of the hexagons on the tile needs to touch another hexagon of the same type that’s already on the board. Then by the middle of the game, My Island is asking you to make clusters of 5 hexagons of the same type, along with green paths snaking through your island, all while trying to have houses on the beaches. Further still, you’re asked to have clusters of 8 tiles or more, while also surrounding certain objects with a specific colour, and have 4 different tiles around another thing, and have a path from the water to the centre of the board.
My City was a breezy, cozy experience. Games took 15 minutes, and while you were always chasing optimal tile placements, you were never really shutting yourself off from most of the scoring opportunities. My Island reminds me more of Calico. There are so many competing objectives and scoring opportunities, that every time you place a tile, you are progressing one of those opportunities, but closing the door on three others. I can’t tell you how many times we would put down our second or third tile in the game, and there would be a chorus of “oh no, I’ve already ruined everything” around the table. By the back half of the campaign, each game took in excess of 40 minutes, which is A LOT when you’re ostensively playing a ‘light’ tile laying game.
Something else to mention, with My City, it was easy to complete a whole chapter in 45 minutes. It was a great game to pull out after we finished whatever mid-weight euro was the main event for the evening. But with every game of My Island hitting 40 minutes, we would go months between single plays. We’d forget what rule episode 7 introduced, and how episode 8 twisted it, making it even more challenging to return to.
It’s kind of impossible to not compare My Island to My City, but that’s the path you choose when you create a spiritual sequel with a nearly identical title and gameplay mechanics. You’re going to get compared. My City was full of charm and whimsy. When someone won, it was good cheer all around, you could see how you could have done better, but hey, that was the luck of the draw. In My Island, my head was constantly in my hands, I was always trying to snap off a single hexagon so I could just finish that one damn cluster. I was stymied by the card draws, and quickly fell behind in victory points.
In the last two chapters of the campaign, you’re tasked with building 3 buildings, and filling up a portal track. In Chapter 7, you aren’t told what these elements do, just that you should probably do them. In the last chapter it’s revealed that each of those buildings you don’t build will cost you 2 victory points per stage you don’t complete. And the overall winner is whomever has the portal track filled up the most, then subtract the victory points you’ve accumulated throughout the entire campaign. When I play a legacy game, I’m always the person whos trying to complete the objectives first, even to the detriment of winning each individual game, so by chapter 8, I had already completed all 3 buildings. My opponents were a little taken aback, but in the end, it all came out in the wash. We all finished all 3 buildings, and all finished the portal tracks. But I can see that being really jarring for someone if they had completely neglected the buildings that weren’t fully explained in the previous chapter.
My Island was good, but not as great as My City. In My City I was excited to start every chapter, to unlock new polyomino tiles, to have some asymmetric tiles depending on who won a specific episode. In My Island, the most asymmetric you’ll get is that you’ll get to put a little sticker on some of your tiles that makes on hex count for 2 of the specific type. Not very exciting. I don’t know if the lack of excitement comes from the bar being set so high in My City, but regardless, I didn’t feel like My Island had as many unique and interesting ideas as the game that came before it. If you’re a die hard fan of My City and are thirsting for more Knizia tile laying puzzles, you’ll probably enjoy My Island. But for most people, I suspect they’ll find themselves missing the joy and simplicity of the game where it all began.
Automobiles: Racing Season feels like a Monkey’s Paw type of expansion. It’s something you thought you really wanted, but when it comes to fruition, you’re left with regrets. You see, this expansion adds 3 more maps, and a Grand Prix mode where you carry over your cubes from race to race, plus individual player powers and in-between race abilities in the form of sponsors.
Now, I’ve already covered Automobiles in-depth (in fact, Automobiles was one of the first reviews I ever wrote), but for those who need it, here’s a quick rundown: Automobiles is a bag building racing game. Each turn, players pull cubes from their bags, and use those cubes to propel their cars around the track. The white, greys, and black cubes are straightforward and present in every race, they move you one space on their associated colour. The colourful dice have variable powers that you set at the start of the race, and do vary pretty wildly, offering some nice replayability, as a different set of cards will make your race feel quite different. The base game also came with 2 different maps for a bit more variety from game to game.
The new tracks and action cards that Automobiles: Racing Season adds can be folded into the base game with no concern for complexity or bloat. Even the driver cards are fairly simple in execution, now each player gets a player power at the start of the race they can use ones per turn. The real meat of the expansion comes in the season campaign.
The season campaign has players carrying over their bag of cubes from one race to another to see who can score the most points over a series of races. Players still pick a driver at the start of the racing season, but once the driver and action cards have been decided, they’re locked in place for the duration of the season. In between races, players can pick a sponsor to help modify their bag of cubes before going onto the next race. Some will prioritize removing wear cubes, while others will let you remove some and add others.
It sounds like everything I wanted in an expansion, but the more I’ve played it, the more frustrated I’ve felt with this set-up. Some of the player powers, specifically the ones that just let players draw extra cubes, feel a lot more helpful than others. Having the action cards being locked for the whole season make sense, but it rips the variability away from the game in general. If one player gets ahead in the first few races, it can be quite challenging to catch up to them.
Perhaps the worst part of all, is the limited nature of the cubes. I’ve found that more often than not, by the end of the first or second race, the majority of the cubes have already been bought, making it quite impossible to modify your racing strategy for future races. You’re stuck with the bag you’ve built, hope it works for all races. This also nerfs the between race sponsers, as the ones that give you a chance to get more cubes are simply less helpful than the ones that will clear the wear out of your bag.
I’ve been playing a lot of Automobiles on Board Game Arena lately, playing a season with each of the recommended action card sets, and some of them are really not geared toward this style of play. In one season, the purple cubes had the ability to remove up to 3 cubes, then add one back in. As I said before, every cube was purchased, aside from the useless yellow and the brown wear cubes, so each purple cube is taking 3 wear out and adding one back in. Near the end of the fourth race, all of our cars had more wear than would have been possible in a physical game, and ensuring that each car could only move one or two spaces each round.
I’m not quite sure how I’d recommend fixing this experience. Locking the action cards and carrying over your bag from race to race makes sense, and it should create a sense of momentum, but in reality, it just saps the variability away, making the 3rd, 4th, and 5th race in the season a dull experience of just running the bag you’ve built and trying to come in first. The mid-game sponsors are comparatively boring, and the driver cards are unbalanced, making it feel a little unfair for one player to hold the best one for 5 races in a row.
Perhaps most importantly, racing games have come a long way in the past 10 years. Restoration Games released Downforce in 2017, which gives players the ability to control all the cars with betting being the way for players to win, Thunder Road: Vandetta is ostensibly a race, albeit a violent one, and a race that ends with one car standing more often than a car passing the finish line. 2022’s Heat: Pedal to the Metal garnered a ton of praise the year it released, and one that I keep meaning to go back to. All of these games do a better job of instilling the feeling of a race, the feeling of momentum, and the excitement of that nail-biting finish
Automobiles: Racing Season ultimately feels like it’s a lap too long. The new tracks and action cards are excellent additions and easily worth mixing into the base game. But once you step into the marquee Season mode, the excitement sputters out. What should feel like a grand championship instead drags into a grind, where you’re stuck with the same bag for race after race, and your ability to modify it is totally diminished.
Automobiles remains a clever and underrated racing game that I’ll happily keep returning to, but the Racing Season expansion doesn’t add fuel to the engine. It’s the kind of expansion that sounds thrilling on paper, but when the rubber hits the road, it only makes me want to pack the new maps and action cards into the base box, and leave the rest behind.
A copy of Wyrmspan was provided by Stonemaier Games for review purposes.
Introduction
Wyrmspan is an odd game to describe. On the one hand, it’s clearly the spiritual sibling of Wingspan, the bird-collecting blockbuster that has brought countless people into our hobby. On the other hand, it trades the gentle avian charm for fire-breathing dragons and cavern excavation. I know I prefer dragons, but I’m not sure if my wife will agree.
I’ll admit, I was sitting on a bus at 7 in the morning shortly after my son was born when I first heard about Wyrmspan, and I let out an audible “pfft”. What I expected at that point was just a full art reskin of Wingspan, perhaps as a collectors item. What designer Connie Vogelmann has done, however, was create something that feels familiar enough to have the “-Span” name, yet is distinct enough to stand proudly on its own.
How to Play
At its core, Wyrmspan keeps the same rhythm as Wingspan. You collect and play dragons to your tableau, hopefully craft an engine, and watch as your combos grow more satisfying every round. But instead of happy little ecosystems, your tableau is a mountain cavern, and your first job is to excavate chambers and then entice dragons to come live in them.
On your turn, you’ll spend dragon coins (a new form of action economy) to do one of three main actions:
Excavate – carve out a new cave, opening up space for dragons and gaining a small bonus.
Entice – pay resources (meat, gold, milk, crystals) to bring a dragon into one of your caves.
Explore – send your pawn through one of your three caverns, triggering resources from your dragons and the spaces between them, effectively activating your engine.
Along the way, you’ll lay eggs, care for hatchlings, and advance on the Dragon Guild track for extra perks. Like in Wingspan, you’re aiming to balance resource management, end-of-round goals, and long-term scoring opportunities, but while the gameplay beats are all familiar, the finished product feels fresh.
Review
The production is everything you’d expect from a Stonemaier Games production. Thick cards, gorgeous speckled dragon eggs, and beautiful artwork that gives each dragon personality. I particularly appreciate that the dragon lore isn’t crammed onto 5 point text on the bottom of the cards themselves, but instead presented in a separate booklet, something that I spent a surprising amount of time flipping through between turns. It’s a nice nod to the theme, and if I can’t use an app to hear each birdsong in my tableau, this is probably the next best thing.
I really have to comment how Wyrmspan improves on some of Wingspan’s rough edges. In Wingspan, early turns could feel painfully slow as you scraped for food and cards, before really opening up in the second and third rounds. Here, the excavation system gives you immediate bonuses, and the Dragon Guild provides a trickle of resources to easily keep things moving. The action economy with dragon coins also gives players more direct control over how and when the round comes to an end. It feels less restrictive, less at the mercy of a bad food dice roll or stagnant card row. I also appreciate that you have a bit of control on when your round ends, in the form of the silver coins. Instead of a set number of rounds, you can choose to keep playing, although it gets crushingly expensive as you choose to do so. I enjoyed managing my silver, choosing to have a lean round so that my next one could be bombastic.
What hasn’t changed, is that like Wingspan, Wyrmspan is still largely multiplayer solitaire. You’ll compete for end-of-round goals, but the bulk of your attention will be mostly focused on nurturing your own cavern of dragons. Personally, I wish there was a bit more friction between players, but the payoff is that Wyrmspan remains friendly and approachable, even with these added layers of complexity.
And speaking of layers, I love the cavern exploration action. Getting bonuses from excavating caves, and bonuses from attracting dragons, turning those bonuses into playing cards, and then moving your pawn through chambers and triggering each dragon as you go is incredibly satisfying. In one game, I had a dragon that cached meat to gain a resource, the next dragon cached meat to gain crystals, and the next dragon paid a crystal to lay 2 eggs, who fed into another dragon who ate eggs for Dragon Guild points. Each dragon fed into each other wonderfully, and made running through that cavern exciting. Discovering those combos is what brings me back to a game time and time again.
Final Thoughts
Is Wyrmspan better than Wingspan? Not necessarily. Wingspan is simpler, cleaner, and more universally appealing. It’s still the game I’d pull out with new players, and it’s the one that has some expansions that improve on the base game quite a bit. Wyrmspan is the heavier sibling, offering more control and more opportunities to shape your engine in clever ways, but overall does require more commitment from its players.
For my collection, the two can happily coexist. My wife still prefers Wingspan for its comfort and accessibility, but I find myself much more drawn to the richer systems of Wyrmspan. And honestly, having dragons to look at instead of backyard sparrows doesn’t hurt.
If Wingspan invited us into the hobby with open wings, Wyrmspan pulls us deeper into the mountain, and rewards us with fire-breathing companions once we get there. I guess the only question remains, is how does Finspan compare?
A perpetual argument amongst ignorant anglophones in the board game community is how you pronounce certain game tiles. Orléans gets the or-LEENZ or OR-le-enh. Being a written medium, I don’t need to wade into this argument. I have the benefit of copy and paste, then everyone can read the word how they choose. My dilemma is if I include the accent over the e or not. Including the accent is technically correct, but leaving it off is almost certainly better for SEO. Is my goal with this blog to be seen, or is it more important to me to be correct? Bah, who’s even searching for Orléans these days, anyway?
Released in 2014, Orléans by designer Reiner Stockhausen hit the scene to critical acclaim, and was promptly nominated for the 2015 Kennerspiel des Jahres. Now, it lost to Broom Service, but I think that speaks more to the proclivities of the Spiel des Jahres judges, and less about the quality of the game itself.
Orléans is a bag building game. Players pulling worker discs from their sacks, then placing them on various work houses on their player boards. Once an action has all the necessary staff, players take turns activating those actions. Generally, they gain a new worker disc, and move up the corresponding track, gaining a specific benefit. Then, the worked workers are also tossed back into the sack until it’s time to draw again.
The actions you’re taking in Orléans are all fairly simple. You move a meeple around a board, dropping guild houses in each of the cities (hopefully doing so before your opponents). You’re earning coins, books, citizens, building new technology tiles, and eventually, sending your staff to the town hall, where they will go onto contribute beneficial deeds, and then… never come back to work for you?
Okay, the theme falls apart pretty quickly when you try to examine it closely. But what’s important here is that the game mechanics are solid. Each turn, you pull a handful of disks out of your bag, and you get to decide which actions you want to take that turn. Sometimes, you’ll be blocked out of an action because you didn’t pull enough blue fishermen. Other times, you’ll draw 4 of him, and get to do almost nothing anyway. I know that doesn’t sound like fun, but bear with me here. I promise it gets good.
The score track in Orléans features these development status spaces, which has the opportunity to multiply some of your endgame score (your guild halls + your citizens). I’ve already touched on the guild halls, just litter them across the province. The citizens generally rest at the end of each of the tracks, which means gunning for one of them is going to fill your bag up with one type of worker. Another way to earn those citizen tokens are for being the last person to contribute to a beneficial deed. In classic group project fashion, all the glory goes to whomever reads the conclusion, not whomever did the most work.
Orléans often feels like a race, you’ll nervously eye your opponents player boards trying to ascertain if they’ll be able to snag the bonus tile that you’re gunning for, or waiting for just the right moment to place your workers onto the beneficial deeds track. Remember, those workers won’t ever come back to your sac, but a well-timed placement can net you one or two of the coveted citizen tokens that multiply your development status.
On one hand, It’s hard to compare Orléans to anything else I’ve played because it feels so unique. Other bag builders (Quacks of Quedlingburg and Automobiles) don’t come close to the same feeling of strategy and engine building that Orléans offers. Crafting your bag to deliver you the perfect workers turn after turn feels satisfying. By the end of the game, you’ve built several new action spaces that only you can use, you’ve covered 4 worker spaces with gears so the actions have become way cheaper, and you’re pushing up on the end of each of the tracks. Orléans
There is such a sense of progression in Orléans. Your bag grows and shrinks, disks come in as you take actions and go up the tracks, and flow out as you commit them to the beneficial deeds. Your actions get stronger as you crawl up those tracks, making it feel like you’re making way more progress that you ever thought possible at the start of the game. That said, Orléans can be a long game, 2 hours or more in the higher player counts. It’s not terrible, but considering you’re kind of doing the same 6 actions/ manipulating the same tracks over and over, it can start to drag if players are ruminating too much on their turns.
It’s kind of fascinating to have such a luck element such as bag building in a strategic euro game. I feel like I should be frustrated by the handcuffs of only being able to take the actions based on the workers that came out of the bag. But that luck is what makes Orléans special. Also, it feels like there are several paths to victory, from having guildhalls all over the place, to running up on the tracks, to just amassing an impressive hoard of goods tiles.
Orléans is one of those rare Euros that manages to be both strategic and a little chaotic. You craft your bag and then just hope the right people show up to work. It rewards careful planning and punishes tunnel vision, offering a dynamic bag-building arc that’s hard to replicate elsewhere.
It’s not perfect. The theme barely hangs together, the rounds can DRAG with overthinkers, and at higher player counts it might outstay its welcome. But what it lacks in narrative flair, it makes up for in mechanical satisfaction.
For Euro fans who enjoy engine-building with just enough luck to keep things spicy, Orléans is a classic for good reason. It’s easy to teach, deeply replayable, and always leaves you wondering how you could’ve done just a bit better.
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.
