It plays fairly fast, with a timeframe of one to two hours for the designated two to four players. Just like I mentioned in my review of its sister-game, Brass: Lancashire is a competitive game with medium to heavy strategy weight for players who are looking to get their brain crunching numbers. And it’s, at its core, the Brass that Martin Wallace envisioned for the tabletop community. With the Deluxe Edition, it’s wonderfully tactile. It’s a game that forces players to consider how to take advantage of their own infrastructure while utilizing those of their peers when necessary. While I prefer Birmingham overall, Lancashire is still a game that transfixes and delights me, and I wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to get my hands dirty in the canal-drenched, coal-clogged world of the Industrial Revolution when men and women of industry turned an opportunity into profit. It’s better looking and it plays smoothly as the refinement process hammered out some of the kinks. Then, it was reheated in the forges of game design and molded into a new form, one that visually impresses while streamlining what made Brass so great. In 2008, this wily devil captivated tabletop gamers across the world and struck a chord with players who treasure strategy and well-adapted plans. Brass: Lancashire, formerly published as just Brass, is the intricate and charming economic game that started it all. It’s highly-popular and it’s one of the top-rated board games of all time.īut that game-designed through the teamwork of Martin Wallace and his collaborators Gavan Brown and Matt Tolman-wouldn’t be possible without its predecessor. The basic rules are reasonably simple to understand: you have to develop industries to score points.Just a little bit ago, I talked about Brass: Birmingham and explored what made the game so great. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.

The game is played in two rounds: the Canal era and the Rail era. Each round consists of a fixed number of turns for each player. Every turn a player can perform two actions from a list of 6 options. We will not dive into the full rules here, as we assume you own the game and have at least read the rules ( get the rulebook from Roxley). However, here are some tips and reminders to help you get started on the first few games you play. Turns are limitedīrass is a game of scarcity. There are many actions and strategies you could take, but you will always find that you can’t do all the things you want to do. In a two player game both of you have 10 turns per era. In the Canal era that means 19 actions (the first turn only has 1 action) and Rail era another 20 actions. As you already have 45 industry tiles it means that you cannot even build all of your own industries (even if you had the resources). That means that you are always fighting against the clock. You should aim to take actions that score as many points as you can get. If you read about Brass, people will typically tell you how much you should score per turn. But, how do you go about scoring points? Get supporting industries up and runningĬoal and iron are the industries that help you build your industrial empire. Sure, they score points too, but are not the driver of the highest points. Understand that a good connection to coal is essentials. You must be connected to a source of coal, or to the market. Your safest bet is to have a connection to the market, so you always have access to coal. Just remember that you need to be connected on any route.

That means you may also use the routes of other players. You can get coal through a route owned by any playerĪn important oversight starting players typically forget. You can build Iron Works anywhere as the iron can ‘teleport’ to where you need it. You can even consume the iron of other players. But…remember that you help them flip their tile. That means you are helping them to score points. If there are no Iron Works on the board you can always get iron through the market for a decent price. Later in the game access to beer becomes important.

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