[Note: This review originally appeared on www.boardgamenews.com]

Martin Wallace is a designer who requires very little introduction. From Age of Steam to Liberte to Struggle of Empires, his challenging and engaging designs, primarily released under his own Warfrog imprint, have been forcing gamers’ brains to “feel the burn” for years. And with Brass (Warfrog Games, 2007, released at Essen 2007), Wallace continued this trend by releasing a game which (in my opinion, at least) is his best effort since his magnum opus, 2002’s Age of Steam.

Given that Brass has been readily available for some months and that others have already outlined the game’s rules in exhaustive detail elsewhere, this review will concentrate more on specific areas of the design that I thought were worth exploring than on trying to shoehorn a rules explanation in. Instead, I’ll try and explain why the game appeals to me, what the challenges it poses are, and what some of the issues with the game are.

That said, however, I can’t quite avoid giving at least a broad overview of the game. Brass is set in Lancashire during the Industrial Revolution – a time where traditional artisanal production was rapidly being overturned and reshaped by coal-fired machines bringing efficiency and rapidity to the manufacturing sector. Players take part in that reshaping, building cotton mills, port facilities, iron and coal works and shipyards to swell their coffers and ultimately bring in the victory points needed to win the game.

Players also build transportation networks – canals in the early game and railways in the late game – that let them bring their cotton to market and also move coal from the mines to the industries that depend on it. These links are also ultimately worth points to their owners. At the end of the second (railway) period of the game, the player with the most points wins.

Mechanically, the game lets players achieve these goals by giving them a set of action cards as well as some starting capital. Game play progresses round by round, with each player using the action cards to carry out several actions: build buildings, build canal/railways, ship cotton, develop industries. To carry out an action, a player must discard a card. In most cases the card doesn’t matter, but when building buildings the location or industry shown on the card must match up with the specific building – this makes hand management important as players only have a limited number of cards in hand each turn. Obviously, a player must also be able to pay any other costs a building has – money, coal and/or iron (with these latter two sourced from the map in as efficient a manner as possible). Once built, buildings get ‘used up’ through the other actions, and the markers representing them are flipped upside down on the board. At this point they are no longer active and will (for the most part) only be useful in securing victory points.

Immediately, one of the game’s many ways of ensuring player interaction comes up: buildings can get ‘used up’ through the actions of others in addition to your own. A few examples:

Since that coal and/or iron must come from the board if possible, players tend to prefer to deplete their own coal mines / iron works, since doing so brings them closer to being worth victory points. But since coal must come from the closest location possible, one will often have to use coal that someone else has produced – helping them ahead instead. Iron is more flexible – it can come from any iron works, regardless of proximity – but even then it occurs more often than not that the only current iron source is someone else’s.

Another example of player interaction is that in order to ship cotton, a player must have a cotton mill that is connected to a port. However, the port used for the shipment doesn’t need to be owned by that player, and the canal / railway network used to ship the cotton to the port doesn’t need to be either. Again, the game gives you ways of making the infrastructure that other players have built work for you.

I like this aspect of the game, since it lets a player look ahead and plan out where to place their industries so as to have other players do as much of the ‘dirty work’ as possible. It also keeps players alert to possible instances where their plans can be snookered, since, for example, a port that Player A was intending to use for themselves can suddenly be used up by Player B. Note that the game does give players the option of shipping cotton to “Distant Markets” – which can be carried out even through a ‘used up’ port – but this option becomes more and more risky over the course of play.

Another key mechanic to the game is that the industries players have available to them are limited – counters of each industry type are stacked in order from ‘least advanced’ to ‘most advanced’, with only the topmost counter in each stack being available for building. This is where the option of developing comes into play, as it permits players to discard counters, thus digging into the more valuable (and expensive) buildings. This poses a question to the players: Is it better to build the cheaper (but less valuable) buildings early or forego some early gains to hopefully build more impressive structures later? In at least once instance the game provides its own answer: 0-value shipyards cannot be legally built on the board, leaving players with no option other than to develop them off of their stacks. For the other industries, however, the answer will often vary and depend on what else the player has in mind.

Brass gives players yet another thing to think about when planning what to build and when: the amount of money you spend on your actions is tracked and will define play order next round. The player who spends the least money will get to act first, while the most profligate spender will have to wait until the end to take a turn. Since several aspects of the game (such as Distant Market shipping) depend on being able to get there first, it can be quite important to deliberately put the brakes on your plans so as to make sure you get what you want next round. Of course, sometimes this can’t be accommodated, since leaving something for a round (such as the very valuable shipyard spaces, of which there are only a few on the board) may be inviting disaster.

There is one final game aspect that I find interesting: the tension between trying to increase income (thus freeing players up to accomplish more in later rounds) and increase victory points (which are, of course, how to win the game). Some buildings (most notably coal mines) will give a player a major income boost when depleted, but don’t award many victory points for the same. Other buildings, such as cotton mills, will provide significant victory points (especially for the more advanced structures) but don’t do much to improve cash flow. Trying to balance both is not an easy task.

So overall, what Brass gives you is a deep, challenging economics game that limits your round over round choices while still giving you a wide sweep of paths to victory to try and follow. You can aim for the high-value shipyards, thus securing your victory points in large chunks. You can aim to build out canal and railway networks, relying on other players to ‘use up’ the industries your links connect (and thus making them worth victory points to the links themselves). You can build a cotton empire, shipping your way to victory. Or you can concentrate on the commodities, looking to make your mark by supplying the needs of others. Or you can do some of everything, jockeying for position and trying to make sure that your interests ultimately come out on top. Whichever path you follow, you can be certain that you’ll be pressured to plan ahead and make the correct decisions all the way through to the end of the game.

So. With as glowing an endorsement as that, there must be nothing wrong with the game, correct? Not quite. There are some rough edges, although I don’t feel any of them detract enough from the gameplay to not make the game worthwhile. The biggest issue, at least in the minds of those on the Internet who have discussed the game previously, is that of the rules.

I will admit the rules gave me some pause when I first read them. They are clear enough, but are structured in a somewhat confusing manner. For the most part, this is because rules are by their nature linear, and Brass is a game with a very circular structure. The game takes place over two periods, and within each period there are several phases that occur. And finally, within the main phase of each period, there are multiple rounds played, each with multiple steps. This means that any explanation of the game must deal with detail on four different levels – period, phase, round and step – and this is where the difficulty arises.

Thankfully, there are a number of excellent player aids available on the Internet, many of which make the game structure more readily identifiable and therefore easier to understand. At its heart the play mechanics in Brass are not that complicated, but the way they interact and the way the overall game is built up around them make things a little harder to deal with, at least at first.

The other issue with the rules is that they are split into two distinct sections: an initial rules explanation, and then an alphabetized glossary that provides more in-depth information on the various aspects of the game. Unfortunately, there are some rules buried within the glossary section, and anyone making the logical assumption that nothing truly salient to playing the game correctly will be found in the glossary will end up frustrated when in-game issues arise that the ‘base’ rules don’t cover.

This issue is really the flipside to the other major issue with the game: there are a number of minor rules and exceptions that take some getting used to. While the game is quite polished, there are still about two or three odd exceptions and special cases that specific rules have had to be introduced to account for. I think it’s unfair to characterize these rules as ‘band-aids’ introduced to fix specific glitches in the game system, but at first blush one does question if there had perhaps been a way to make things a little simpler. Repeat play makes it more evident that this was probably not possible, and in any case the game doesn’t really suffer through them. Overall I don’t have an issue with the few ‘fiddly’ rules – there are certainly many other games out there whose rules are much harder to keep track of! Just remember that while your influence can cross the Mersey, your building supplies can’t and you’ll be fine…

In conclusion, there is little I can find about Brass to seriously question whether I’m justified in wholeheartedly recommending the game to anyone who is a fan of deeper, more challenging fare. While not quite the brutal yet sweet agony of Age of Steam, there is enough meat on Brass’ bones to keep me happy for a long, long time.

pk