Friday, 23 October 2026

Brass Birmingham

Gavan Brown, Martin Wallace and Matt Tolman · 2018 · Ghenos Games

Players

2–4

On the box

60–120min

At our table

135–150min

Weight Boar· 3.86 out of 5

Text in the game None

What it is

Brass Birmingham is an economic euro game about expanding across a map, set in England during the Industrial Revolution. Everyone is an entrepreneur trying to grow their own network of industries around Birmingham.

The map is full of towns, and each one has only a few spots to build coal mines, ironworks, cotton mills, manufacturers, potteries and breweries. Grabbing the most interesting towns before the others matters a lot. Then the towns have to be linked together, first with canals and later with railways, because an industry only pays off if you manage to sell what it produces. And to sell, you need a route that reaches the markets, and a bit of beer.

Coal and iron are bought from the market or taken from other players’ industries, and that’s where the interaction comes from: your network is useful to your opponents too, and theirs is useful to you. Points come from the industries you managed to make profitable and from the links to the most important towns, and they’re counted twice: at the end of the canal era and at the end of the rail era.

How it plays

There’s real management of an economic engine, there’s expansion across the map, and there’s plenty of interaction with the others, for better and for worse. You need to grab the best spots to grow and, above all, not let anyone block your route. How you handle the cards in your hand matters too, because they tell you in which towns and which industries you can build.

Loans are a valuable tool, and it’s normal to take two or three in a game, but they only pay off if you win back the lost income within a round. If you drag one along for three or four rounds, you’ve already eaten up those thirty pounds. Sales, on the other hand, are best done in one go towards the end, without wasting actions on single sales, as long as there’s still beer on the board. And watch out for the mid-game scoring, because whatever is still standing when you move from canals to railways decides where you start again.

The nugget

Birmingham has more miles of canals than Venice: before the railways, coal travelled by water.

At our table

To me Brass Birmingham is one of the most beautiful and elegant games ever made. And I’m not the only one: it has been number one on BoardGameGeek since 2023.

135′

150′

at threeat four

Median of our games, by player count. The dashed band is 60–120′, what the box says.