Economic · 2018

Brass: Birmingham

Build industries, connect towns and sell your goods in industrial England.

2–4 players
60–120 min
3.9 / 5 · Heavy

Set up the game

0 of 8 steps

Tick each step as you complete it.

1Choose the day or night side of the board (only the artwork changes) and place it in the middle of the table.
The board and its locations
2With fewer than 4 players, return to the box all cards and merchant tiles showing a higher player count. Shuffle the rest and place one face up on each merchant space marked with your player count. In a 2-player game no tiles go in Warrington or Nottingham; in a 3-player game none go in Nottingham.
Merchant location
3Place 1 beer barrel on each beer space next to a non-blank merchant tile.
Merchant tile
4Prepare the markets: place 1 black cube on each coal space, leaving one £1 space free; place 1 orange cube on each iron space, leaving both £1 spaces free. The remaining cubes and barrels are an unlimited supply.
Coal and iron market
5Each player chooses a colour and takes their player mat (day or night side), £17, their character tile, link tiles and industry tiles. Place the VP marker on 0 and the income marker on 10.
Player mat
Tokens
Character
Marker
6Organise your industry tiles on the mat by type and level, with the black side face down. Lower-level tiles must be removed before you can build higher-level ones.
Industry tiles
7Shuffle the character tiles and place them in a random order on the turn order track.
Turn order
8Shuffle the draw deck (location and industry cards), place the wild location and wild industry decks face up in their spaces, and deal 8 cards to each player. Place the money beside the board as the bank.
Location card

What it is about

Brass: Birmingham is an economic game for 2–4 players set in the Industrial Revolution. Across two eras — first canals, then railways — you build industries, connect them to markets and sell goods to earn victory points. On your turn you discard a card and take an action: Build, Network, Develop, Sell, Loan, Scout or Pass; you normally take two actions per turn, though the first round of the Canal Era gives you only one. Coal mines, iron works and breweries flip when their resource runs out; cotton mills, manufacturers and potteries flip when you sell their goods to a merchant using beer. At the end of each era you score flipped tiles and links, and after the Rail Era the player with the most points wins. The key is an efficient network, steady income and using actions that may also help your rivals.

BGG page Official rulebook

Source note

The supplied PDF is a teaching guide and FAQ: it does not include the full setup or strategy advice. Setup was completed with the official rulebook. The table-level questions (free resources, farms, era change) also draw on the supplied DOCX FAQ; strategies are editorial proposals pending review.

Teaching Guide + FAQ (Roxley, 2023); setup completed with the official rulebook (EOG v1.2, 2019) · Reviewed: 24 Oct 2026