The original Brass was named after northern British slang for money, which was not only a fitting title for a board game that simulated the booming economy of the industrial revolution but, as it turned out, a prophetic one. Brass (later renamed Brass: Lancashire) was popular, but a second iteration on the design that smoothed out its harder edges, named Brass: Birmingham, proved one of the most popular hobby board games of all time – if not one of the best board games overall. Not content with resting on their laurels, publisher Roxley is now working on a third version set in the gilded age of the United States called Brass: Pittsburgh.
You might suspect this is mere cash-in on a popular title, but it’s something fans have been thirsting for since the previous version came out in 2018. "People have been asking for another sequel for years," explains Gavan Brown, who designed Brass: Birmingham based on Martin Wallace’s original. "I have always believed the Brass system has a vast unexplored design space."
A greater challenge
For those familiar with the series, the new board and cards will be instantly recognizable. There’s still a network of cities, with spaces for different types of industry tiles, and players still have a tree of industries they can pay cards, cash and resources to place onto the board. Many of these create resources that other players can utilize, using networks created by their opponents. Spending up all the resources on an industry flips it, creating profit for its owner. It’s this clever circularity, where players are partially dependent on each other, that's made the game so popular: a rare mix of demanding strategy with enough theme and social interaction to keep it varied, engaging and believable.
Once you dive into the details, the new aspects of Brass: Pittsburgh become apparent. Brown cites three key changes identified by playtesters as standing out. "First, we have decentralized markets: you now sell resource cubes to different connected cities instead of to a centralized market," he explains. "Second, one of the new resources, coke, takes time and clever tactics to set up, but rewards the player with 4VP for every cube sold. Third, the oil resource has special pipelines, which allow players to 'prospect' an oil field. Oil travels first by pipeline, which awards the pipeline's owner with various possible rewards."
New to the series? Although Pittsburgh isn't available yet, you can pick up Brass: Birmingham easily enough via Amazon, where the original game (now renamed Brass: Lancashire) is also up for grabs.
The result is a game that boasts a much greater strategic challenge, with many more factors and resources to juggle, while still retaining the social interdependencies that characterize the original. Brown has deliberately rejigged aspects of the game to ensure players have to react to the dynamism on the board rather than relying on tried and tested strategies.
"There is no rail on the board that will guarantee you a ton of points," he says. "When you place a rail, you need to forecast what your opponents will want to build in the locations adjacent to it, or have a plan yourself of how to make those rails worth something. There are also no tiles on your player board that are 'auto develop.' Every tile has a use in the game, and you need to figure out a plan for how to maximize their value."
[Rail]roads paved with gold
In both the existing games, there’s a mid-point switch between the canal networks players begin with to transport their goods and resources, and the more efficient railways that come later. This is a thematic abstraction of how the industrial revolution unfolded; the canals are literally removed from the board and players start re-building their networks. In Pittsburgh, players start with railways initially but there’s still a similar mid-point switch with existing networks disappearing and needing to be re-built, unless they strategize around investing in another new option, more expensive 'heavy' trains which stay on the board.
This can feel jarring, but Brown is broadly aiming to make the game feel more thematic, not less. "Historical accuracy is of paramount importance to me, so the research performed during the design of Pittsburgh represented an immense amount of work," he explains. “An example of this is making all resources travel by rail, versus having iron 'teleport.' Also the decentralized market system better represents that different regions of the map may need to pay more for commodities than other areas." He also suggests that the gilded age is a better fit for the game’s social dynamics than the industrial revolution, noting that "the interdependence of the main industries of the time was a perfect fit."
Interestingly, much of the playtesting for this game has taken place on the digital board gaming site BoardGameArena. This is a novel approach that allows the team to get faster and wider feedback from testers, supported by measurable metrics. It means that Brass: Pittsburgh will have a ready-made module for the site when it hits retail, a useful selling point. It’s also created a baseline from which additional creative possibilities can be explored, and Brown reveals they’re in the pipe. "For Pittsburgh I had to come up with the most innovative mechanisms and dynamics I could think of, which led to many more ideas that we will explore in future Brass titles," he says.
It sounds like there could be a lot more brass to come, in every sense, for players and the publisher alike.
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