How to play Brass: Birmingham

2–4 players (best at 3–4) Heavy — economic engine builder

What is Brass: Birmingham?

Brass: Birmingham is a heavy economic strategy game by Martin Wallace in which you build industries and transport networks across industrial-revolution Birmingham. Over two distinct eras — the Canal Era and the Rail Era — you develop coal mines, iron works, breweries, and factories, selling goods to merchants and expanding your reach across the map. Every tile you place is a bet on the future, because industries only score when their resources are consumed or their goods are sold.

The design rewards patience and spatial thinking. You share resources with your opponents, coal and iron flow across a contested board, and a well-timed sale can flip a cluster of your tiles — triggering income and victory points at once. The two-era structure means the board resets between halves: every link you built in the Canal Era is swept away, forcing you to rebuild your network from scratch with rail lines before the final reckoning.

Setup

Lay out the board in the center. Shuffle the merchant tiles and place them face-up on the merchant locations around the board's edge according to player count.
Each player takes their color — collect your player mat, a supply of canal and rail link tiles in your color, and two score markers. Place your Victory Point marker at 0 on the score track and your Income marker at the starting income position marked on the track.
Deal cards — shuffle the full card deck and deal 8 cards to each player (10 cards each in a 2-player game). Place remaining cards face-down as the draw deck. Each card shows a city name or an industry type — you will discard one to pay for each action.
Set the era marker to the Canal Era side.
Place starting resources — add coal and iron cubes to the board at the spots printed in the rulebook; these are shared resources that any player can use.
Starting money — the first player in turn order receives £17 from the bank; each later position receives slightly more to offset going later (see the rulebook for exact amounts per position).
First turn reminder — the very first player on the very first turn of the whole game takes only one action instead of the usual two.

How to play

Each round, players take turns performing two actions — except for the very first player on the very first turn of the game, who takes only one. Every action requires discarding a card from your hand, and you refill your hand to capacity at the end of your turn.

The six actions are:

Build — place an industry tile from your player mat onto a matching location, paying its money cost plus any coal or iron it requires
Network — add a canal (Canal Era) or rail link (Rail Era) to extend your network; rail links cost coal
Develop — discard iron from the supply to remove low-level tiles from your player mat, exposing the stronger tiers underneath
Sell — connect your cotton mills, manufactured goods, or pottery to a merchant location and sell them, consuming beer in the process; sold tiles flip and score
Loan — receive £30 immediately by dropping your income level on the income track
Scout — discard three cards to gain two wild cards (one location wild, one industry wild)

At the end of the Canal Era, score victory points for your flipped industry tiles and any canal links you placed, then remove all level-1 industry tiles and every canal from the board. Deal fresh hands and begin the Rail Era on the same map but with an empty network.

How to win

After the Rail Era ends, players score a final time: count victory points from rail links plus all flipped industry tiles still on the board. The player with the most total victory points wins — ties broken by remaining income.

The key strategic tension is between income and end-game points. Taking loans and building cheap low-level tiles generates cash flow early, but those tiles vanish at the era break if they haven't been flipped. Developing past early tiers and clustering industries so a single sale flips multiple tiles at once is how strong players convert a modest income into a decisive VP lead.