Brass is a game I should like. It’s from Martin Wallace and I love Age of Steam (in a platonic way, nothing seamy). It’s a building and delivery game which I like. You can shaft your neighbor which is always fun unless it happens to you. What’s not like? Unfortunately more than I thought.

This will not be a positive review of the game, but I will still try to be fair with it. If you are a rabid fan of Brass, please make your comments to this review civil. I’m not saying, “It sucks!” so you don’t need to tell me how much I do.

Components:

You get a game board with antiquated art, a bunch of sturdy counters/tiles, horrible plastic coins and some wooden bits for determining who goes first and how much money you make. The art is functional and sufficiently “period” for the time it is trying to capture. The board and box seem to have a preponderance of an orange/brown color which I’m not a big fan of. Strangely the colors chosen for the bits are more attractive in my opinion. Instead of the generic primary colors, they went for softer shades. You get teal, purple, soft yellow and a brick red. I wish more games would use colors other than primary. On the down side, the board and colors look more muted and tiles don’t pop as much as I would like. In the endgame, things get very crowded and the lack of bright, glaring colors mixed with copious illustrations does not help the eye assess details.

The money is horrible, I can’t help but think that Martin Wallace ordered a truckload of this money for age of steam and is still trying to get rid of it. The stuff is made like tiddly winks. In fact, you can play tiddly winks with the money chits if you get really bored during the game.

Overall, I think the components are a okay: Very sturdy components with the exception of the terrible money, and some okay artwork with subdued colors.

Gameplay:

This is where any game I play will make it or break it for me. You can have ugly as sin components as long as the game play is there (Galactic Destiny comes to mind). Brass sort of makes it. The game has good strategy and surprising depth with enough randomness provided by the cards you are dealt. However I think the rules are really too heavy for what the game is and appear to be patched together. The parts are great but they don’t gel into a whole for me. For full rules reference, I refer you to… the rules.

The first thing that you’ll notice is that you are required to stack all your buildings from highest number on the bottom to lowest on top. This creates a major gaming hazard, the “arm sweep tiles fly” problem. Also stacked tokens means you are constantly looking underneath to see what you want further down. Why they didn’t just print a player mat to put the tokens on, I don’t know. Many of the people I see playing lay the tokens in flat rows. It accomplishes the same purpose and gets rid of most of the problems.

Once you get your tokens sorted and everybody gets their money the game is on. You get 6 cards and then are given two more each turn until the deck is dry. This is your time counter as well as your choices of where to play (you play 2 cards every turn). The cards are either an industry or a location on the board. Somewhat logically, you can build in any city of the board that you have the card for as long as you build one of the building types allowed in the city (visually marked on the board). Or, not-so-logically you can build an industry of your choice in a city that you are “connected” to by having an industry already there or having a canal connection that is yours. So you can’t build into a city you have no direct connection to without the city card. With me so far? Good. You must build your industries in order (thus the chit stacks) unless you take an action to research which requires you buy two iron from the market. Why do you buy two iron to research? Who knows, it’s a game mechanic. When you research you get to remove two tiles from the stacks and throw them away. This allows you to get to higher number industries fasters and score more points with them (the game is about points). You will also get points for building canals between major cities which have the added benefit of connecting you to that city and allowing you to ship goods through the canal. What do you ship…cotton and coal. Iron does not need to be shipped and instantly teleports to where it is needed. Why? I don’t know, it’s a game mechanic. Cotton ships to ports and coal ships wherever it is needed (in this phase of the game usually for building cotton mills). Nobody owns any resource (just the tile it is on) and coal always comes from the nearest source (yours or anyone else) If you have no source, then no coal for you. When you ship cotton you flip over the port used and the factory/mill. The respective owners of those tiles gain an income boost from the tile being flipped. Unfortunately they are no longer usable. Coal and iron buildings flip when all the coal or iron are removed and owning players move their income up accordingly. At the end of the canal era you score VPs equal to all your flipped buildings and all your canals. Then all canals and level one industries are removed from the game. Why? I don’t know, apparently the rail era started with everyone sinking their canal boats and refusing to transport unless you by them a shiny new train.

You continue into the rail era and do the exact same thing you did in the canal era except you can’t play level one industries anymore either. So your infrastructure is mostly gone. If you heavily research you may have some higher level buildings around. You start creating rails and new industries. New ports and new connections to the external market are built which will sell you coal and iron if nothing is on the board. Then you run out of cards again and scoring happens a second time (you get points again for any flipped industries that survived the purges of the first half). The game ends and everyone goes home.

The game seems simple but does have a good array of choices. Sometimes your moves are obvious but many times several are beneficial and it is unclear which one will win for you. I usually set my cards up in “Mexican Train” fashion of putting them in an order that will optimize their use. Inevitably someone will take something I want and then I will need to rearrange cards but that’s part of the game. This ability to “shaft” someone ends up being rather limited. If someone is foolish enough to build a port before a mill, you can use it to ship your goods and then they can’t. This isn’t horribly mean and is often more of an inconvenience. In fact the odds are that you will only really screw someone over by total accident. You’ll play into the city they needed or construct rails where they were going. In that way it is more like Ticket to Ride. Not really a directly confrontational game.

The Patchwork

This game while, having fun options and strategies, seems to bog down in its strange rules and exceptions. Probably the best example of this is a quasi-invisible line that connects Liverpool to Birkenhead. This line has no purpose in the game other than to show that this town and Liverpool are considered connecting for building purposes. But you can’t actually build a canal or rail there. And it only gives you connection for building so you can’t ship through it. Why is this quasi-connection on the map? Dunno, it’s the rules. Other bizarre restrictions added purely to balance the game are things like you cannot build a level 2 shipyard during the canal age, even though you can build anything else (this keeps the highest point tiles in the game from scoring twice). There’s even an explanation of why there are canals in the middle of the bays of the map board. The player aid conveniently includes 13 easy to forget game rules. Just think about how many rules there are to just have 13 easy to forget ones.

Now, I know many games have odd rules and if you look at them too closely the game doesn’t “make sense.” I hearken this to suspension of disbelief that is often talked about in movies. There comes a moment when the museum beast either comes off as scary or is totally silly. If it’s scary you go along for the thrill ride. If it’s silly you just laugh and disengage from the movie. Brass is like a museum beast that looks silly. Every time I come up against these bizarre design choices, my game comes to a screeching halt and I’m no longer into it. What do you mean iron teleports? Why doesn’t it transport like coal and cotton? What do you mean my infrastructure disappears halfway through and I have to start over? This choice is really the most jarring as you basically stop what you are doing and the game ends… and then restarts. Its like watching half of the movie and then having the director come on screen and say its now time to watch the move again with a different cast of characters Sure, it works in game mechanics, but it fells very awkward.

When looking at Brass from a distance, I can say it as a balanced and challenging game. When I look at it closer, it really falls apart for me. Rather than a well designed and streamlined game, I see a bunch of patches or fixes added to achieve the balance on a game that would have no balance without them. I can almost here the head of play testing saying, “Martin, the play testers are building level two shipyards in the canal phase and scoring twice.” Follow by his response, “Okay, they can’t do that anymore.” Not, “Let’s try to balance the level 2 shipyards so we don’t need to add an extraneous rule.”

While I can admire the depth of strategy in Brass, it just leaves me feeling like I’ve played 2-3 hours of rules gymnastics. If I’m going to do that, I’ll play Goa, which I like much better.


Higher Primate assessment of Brass:
Bits: ook factor 2.5 (love the colors, but not the period art work)
Game play: OOK factor 2 (deep strategy but strange rules detract from the game)
Replayability: ook factor 3 (it is always a challenge)
Tension : ook factor 2 (only in whether your opponent will inadvertently steal your move)
Accessibility : ook factor 2 (highly counter-intuitive in many ways)
Overall: OOK factor 2 (I’d play it, but you’d need to bribe me)