I would have preferred a different mechanic to one of them. They have small detail changes from tile to tile, but on a whole feel way too similar. Also Manufacturing and Cotton mills are just a bit too similar in game terms for my liking. Pottery is close with the need to develop and huge victory points gains, but it still needs to be shipped to flip. The only “Slight” disappointment I would have is that there is nothing quite like the “Shipyard” tiles where you spend a lot and just SLAM down VPs. I love breweries, I think the third resource adds a lot. I like the random placement of markets, it gives the game interesting twists when the pottery tiles are all on the very south. The way Cotton/Manufacturer/Pottery is shipped seems to make so much more sense.
Being able to take loans until the end of the game just makes sense, also the game stops you from being dumb and only offers 30$ loans. The scout action is better than the discarding 2 cards to use as any city. On the changes, I will say just about everything just “Made sense”. Setting your cards aside to use the weaker ones for canals/rails and trying to do the best with what you have gives a strong tactical element to the game. Being able to see clearly how many turns are left makes actions quantifiable and gives weight to every decisions. Listening to it in a video makes if feel finicky but once you’re actually playing the game you see the brilliance of its elegance. The card discard/hand mechanic that controls the entire game… is BRILLIANT. Our supplies never dropped very much because everyone was ready to pounce. Every time the supply dropped you could see people planning and vibrating to be the first one to build an industry that filled it back up to get the auto flipped tile. The tension through the game to go first was palpable. We ran out of iron cube components because people were building iron mines early and developing, I wondered to myself “How many people actually do this at the start of the game? Are we being weird? Did we run out of iron cubes because no one thought any group would do these terrible actions”. We all started the game by picking a corner and building up on our own, it felt weird and I’m not sure how common that was, Birmingham itself didn’t get heavily developed until the very very end of the game. It’s the type of game that constantly adjusts based on what people are doing. The theme and components did such a good job of pulling me in and the possibility space of the game was brilliant. I was completely in love with how organically the board state was unfolding and the decisions I had the opportunity to make. Absolutely amazing, this is one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had”. There were some obtuseness to the rules such as constantly having to remember the distinction between “The” Grid, “Your” Grid and being “Connected” and every resource needing a unique combination of those 3 terms, but we had it under control after a whileĪbout 30-40 minutes before the game ended I was starting at the board thinking “This is amazing. We kept adding to our grids and might have missed some opportunity. We all forgot until the very end that if you use a city card, you can play an industry in that city without it being connected to your grid. We only got 1 rule wrong the entire game and it wasn’t so much “Wrong” as we just forgot something “Special” with a card type.
I felt that we were pretty solid getting through it for first timers, after set up the game only took 90 minutes. We watched the “Watch it Played” video together, remarked that the video took almost as long as our entire game of Container, and then felt ready to go. We played with a group of 4, all of whom have never played it nor the original. I played Brass: Birmingham over the weekend and have to say it was quite possibly the best game I’ve ever played.
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