Brass: Birmingham - Shut Up & Sit Down Review

all right my eager capitalists who remembers my review of brass is that the one where you fell in a canal I think of it as the one where I took on that illustrious 2007 strategy game like a matador the script starting this way and that before I know bleep prodded at it with my spear of criticism I think most people think of it as the one where you fell in the canal ten years on from its original release I found brass to be quite demanding and slow compared to more modern games vying for your shelf space and then you dropped cake on the bore tire that was great well last year Canadian publisher Rox T Games kick-started some new additions of brass there's brass Lancashire which is a beautiful new edition of the original game but today we're looking at the other projects this brass Birmingham this sequel to brass effectively this is a collaboration between original designer Martin Wallace and rocks League games and this review in itself is a bit of a sequel if you'd like to know more about the specifics of how brass plays we're going to politely ask you to go watch Quinn's original review you'll find a link to that in the description because today we're gonna be talking about what makes this different and is it better did we like it more or less than original brass but straight out of the box the art in this game is sensational yes while the original brass did like the unfinished walls of someone's guest bedroom brass Birmingham brings the Industrial Revolution to life glimpses of green and blue disappearing under wrought iron and satanic Mills and if you flip the boards you can swap day for night this doesn't change the game it's just sheer luxury and honestly this is my favorite kind of luxury it's not a lavish or expensive box but it's a production that just emanates warm the process of unpacking it just makes you feel fuzzy inside it's like a box of chocolates that no one else currently knows exists aesthetically this is a labor of love a cosy box that holds you back in time to an era of brutal coldness a time of sweat and coal a period of history in which if your fireplace was dirty you'd have to go and find a man who owned a child who would then send that child up the chimney with a brush to clean it thankfully though the world today is extremely different and it's all been streamlined with a knack ah how good is boyfriend honestly it's so cheap I can't quite even work out how these children make a living so I get us a boy sir pack the game away when we're done with the review Quinn's I've been hearing the words self-care a lot recently which means I think this is fine okay Oliver will be here in eight minutes we have to do this review in eight minutes so underneath the art not much has changed and the things that have changed make the game more obtuse than the original brass and if you're familiar with the original brass that should set off some serious alarm bells you're still going around digging canals or making railways you're still hungry Li hoovering up the little blocks of coal and the blocks of iron from the player made coal mines and iron my factories that you've made before but now rather than just shipping cotton your shipping cotton and pottery and the disappointingly generically named manufactured goods there's boxes just shipping boxes don't ask what's in the boxes we're all going to make a lot of money but more than that you've also got a brand new resource but yeah now beer is beautiful and complicating the fact that it doesn't work like coal or iron coal has to be attached to the network in order to be used iron doesn't have to be attached to the network at all and can be brought from anywhere at any point because iron can be carried in small amounts by horses and horses just traditionally aren't interested in networking at all it's why whenever you go to events and see horses there they never carry any business cards but no beer is an unholy hybrid if you want to use someone else's beer then it has to be connected to the network but if you want to use your own beer it can be anyway can be connected just at your but of a network or off on its own in the hills which is exciting but it is just another fiddly rule in the game that arguably didn't need anymore fiddle the other changes are less exciting obviously the map of towns and connections is different and rather than just shipping all your cotton West brass Birmingham actually scrambles the places where you send goods so in our game we're sending cotton south and pottery north and the all-important hub connection but accepts everything is to the east which means in our game it's Belle pers time to shine another difference is if you choose to spend your time discarding cars so that you can build anywhere you get to wildcards which is slightly more generous so Quinn's as the person who reviewed but ultimately didn't recommend the original brass what do you think Matt can I get a drumroll yes I recommend brass Birmingham with every fiber of my being I think this is my favorite management game since Great Western trail I think this is one of my new favorite games I don't ever it sits up there in the list it's is so good it is so good great game design isn't always 100% neat and clean and tidy and Birmingham arguably in lots of ways is slightly messy there's lots of strange amendments lots of tiny tweaks to things here and there superficially everything originally just looks fine but then you have a look underneath the bonnet and you can tell it's had some interesting work done but to go through all of these vital changes with a toothpick would be as tedious as going through patch notes for an online RPG that doesn't exist I'll give you the top line here brass was a game which was complicated and unforgiving whereas brass Birmingham is a game that's just complicated in Quinn's original review of brass he talked about how at some points in the game it felt like your options became a tight corset with you looking around the board the things you could do checking the rules no no no no no no it's all the one thing you can do on your next turn you think it's just anything I can do your friend does it before you could in this version of the game in brass Birmingham all of these tiny changes create a version of the game that suits other people better people like me who maybe are not as good at the super turbo complex cruel games both games feel so similar both games give you a hand off eight cards to choose from every time but for players like me brass Birmingham is the only game regularly gives me meaningful choices this makes the game easier and harder but it's the right kind of easy and the right kind of hard there's less searching the board the one thing you can do where frustration turns into desperation there's more cherry-picking of all I might do that and then that I might do this all that more choices that be exciting and crucially the spikes of emotion that come up in games of brass or when someone else has taken something that you wanted but in these cases it's often because they've been caning savvy they've gone I'm gonna take that because I know that someone else wants it rather than just being a toddler that stumbles onto their sand castle because they were confused and didn't know where else to go along the same lines randomizing where you ship goods every games means that brass Birmingham is much more of a game about reacting to something that's fluid some games the game will dark south than Birmingham the great spidery hub will be where all the action is in other games he'll have to go further nerve which is northern for north and pay through the nose linking up all these tiny towns now this is great because we always say on shut up and sit down it's awesome when games are different every time you play because it means you have that much more likely to take that game off the shelf and get your money's worth similarly it's lovely in brass Birmingham that you can specialize because buildings get better every time you build one you are rewarded for choosing one particular thing that you're really gonna do this game like in one game you might choose to be Billy beer who dictates the flow of the game with beer lubricating the entire network in another game you might be the fastidious missus manufacturer building boxes that are different every time or my personal favorite you can be Peter pottery a high-risk high-reward play because Potteries unbelievably expensive and also half of them are bad but if you can get them on the limited spaces on the board where they go then flip them you get incredible rewards and actually that kind of sums up Birmingham because that same mechanic was in brass but it's so much more present here the freedom you have me that you have the opportunity to specialize far more with just tweaking this mechanic opens up like a flower growing beside a canal house and let's be honest this our --hour the experience oh it's gorgeous and you know I've got to say we always love it when board games do make an effort to be a little bit more diverse which is why I was thrilled to discover that when I just flipped this play it's open you can be a man or can be a man with a hat I do think some of these have women on which ones this one we flipped the red one that one you flip that one I rotate did you did you flip this one no oh here they are to be fair though I think they did actually make a decent effort to include every prominent female industrialist of the era in the game just there weren't many of them maybe it's just that men are more naturally inclined to sending children up chimneys etc are we the bad guys yes okay so much of great game design resides in the details we're not just talking about rules here either when you're dealing with a communal shared space of things that you touch and hold and move around aesthetics and how things feel are incredibly important they're like a hotline to your soul and brass Birmingham for me it might be a modern master class of things and bits the board is wonderfully claustrophobic and dense allowing for industry to explode like a virus your player boards are a pain in the bum to set up but these tiny treats feel like a sweet shop window of possibility but the best thing look at how readable the game state is because of the choice of components different materials creating tiers of prominence that allow you to see the important stuff first beer then cold and iron then the buildings and networks on the board in an era in which a lot of people want games to be all plastic or all wood this is a textbook example of why texture is good I think we can summarize this really simply when Matt and I finished a game of Regional brass now brass Lancashire we just feel a bit exhausted whereas with brass Birmingham every time I finished a game of this I just want to play it again immediately which is why brass Birmingham gets the shot sit down recommends better clean easy if this was just brass but with less friction and better ah that would be great that would be enough but it's got all its other stuff it's deeper it's more thematic beer is unusual and fascinating and funny you build it off miles away from everything else which is just the complete opposite of how brats usually work and more than that you'll build it you'll have your beer and then you specifically won't drink your beer you'll drink other people's beer first just because it's annoying and they'll look at you with horror from it and that's why I play games you know what else then this really surprised us it is cheap right I mean your mileage may vary depending on where you live in the world but broadly got into the numbers that I could Google brass Birmingham is $30 cheaper than a feast for Odin it is $20 cheaper than lowlands it's even about five dollars cheaper than Great Western trail look and comes in this tiny bar this is so important to me this can just go anywhere I love it it is still play remarkably tricky game to teach and learn and it is still a game which has a level of complexity which means occasionally things will grind to a stop and they'll be some and perilous is a nice quantity of it it's a game which basically is still hard work but is so much more readily rewarding of that work it's not a game that feels like it's draining you it's a game where it pops into life and leaves chain off it's exciting it's electrifying I mean we've played you played original brass what you paid it twice I played it twice and I don't have any interest in playing again this I've played four maybe five times in the last month and I would play it again right now I'd like to play it again right now it's one of those games were filming the review we have just been like oh I wish we weren't working I wish we were playing yes yeah as soon as you start unboxing at the door oh here's this idea of your board game very late please sir would you like a complimentary bottle of water oh thank you very much yeah maybe two stars what if I did the YouTube outro alright if you've enjoyed this video they have other videos that you can watch all sorts of board game coverage well it's best you please [Music]

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 401,164

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Shut Up Show, Board Game Review, Review, Shut Up, Sit Down, Board Games, Board Gaming, Family Games, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Paul Dean, Matt Lees, Brass, Brass: Birmingham, Roxley Games

Id: e3efv2HkjDI

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/anwei40]

When a review starts with qualifications and nuanced criticism, I know they freaking love it.

[u/Pianoman1092]

Man I got got on that inverse-SUSD-mid-review-turnaround.

[u/S0noPritch]

Excellent review. I'm not surprised to see Brass veterans prefer the game they're used to but I do find this to be an extremely positive evolution of the concept. It makes me excited to think of what other games could go through an update/reimagining like this.

[u/SpikeBolt]

I absolutely love Brass: Birmingham, I have played it 5 times and I'm still super eager to play it again. Now I get sad when we have 5 people for game night! (just kidding, please show up guys).

I love how every decision feels so impactful and meaningful, how every strat feels like it could work, the constant indecision between saving a turn but help an opponent. I didn't think the rotating markets would be neat but they really do change how people approach the game. I love it.

I got the deluxe version of the game and even though I overpaid (didn't back it on KS, bought on retail) I feel super glad I did it. Those poker chips are great.

Fantastic game, fantastic production, I'll be sure to check Roxley games way more closely.

[u/E1ghtbit]

Man this game looks beautiful, but the complexity and length is a killer. At least Rodney has a Watch it Played, but still...

[u/cmdr_metcalf]

Another cracking review from the SU&SD crew, they really do produce the best reviews on the internet.

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Although they presented their opinions well, I personally don't agree with the view that Brass: Birmingham is a contender for game of the year whilst Brass: Lancashire is a markedly poorer game. I love them both and see only minor differences between them. Perhaps once Matt & Quinns have played Birmingham multiple times they should try going back to Lancashire. They may find hidden depths and an improved experience over those earlier plays.

[u/losfp]

Fun review to watch, as always. Even if I don't always agree with their opinions, IMO they present those opinions in such a way that you can watch it and go - oh, I don't agree with that, I can see that I will like/dislike this based on that.

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I had the original (ok a reprint) of Brass and just never got it to the table because ugly. I traded it away because I knew that this new edition was coming, and backed both because it was better value and assumed I'd like one more than the other and keep that one.

​

But now that I've played both (just once each), I'm actually not 100% sure which one I like better. Lancashire is tough and unforgiving, and yes, it looks like there's some scripted moves depending on the player group... but the relative simplicity of the strategy and the brutal tightness is actually something I really enjoy. On the other hand, Birmingham opens up your options and introduces new ways to specialise and streamlines some stuff (only $30 loans, loans all the way through) but also introduces a new way to make your brain hurt because now you have to worry about beer and hunting down the double-point industry tiles to connect to and and and.....

Right now I'm hanging onto both. They're similar enough that it's minimal effort to teach someone one if they already know the other... but also different enough that you get a different experience depending on whether you're in the mood to be stabby or slightly less stabby.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/AmoDman]

"You can be a man with a hat!"

Killed it.