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 player count higher than yours. Shuffle the remaining merchant tiles 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 of the progress track.
Player mat
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 puts you in charge of a family business in the West Midlands between 1770 and 1870. You begin in the Canal Era, when moving coal and goods by water is the decisive advantage, and finish in the Rail Era, with faster networks and more demanding markets. There are no dice: everything depends on the cards you discard, the tiles you build and the links you open.

Unlike many euros, your actions do not happen in a vacuum: building a mine or an iron works can supply your rivals, and selling to a merchant can open markets you both use. That tension between competition and cooperation is what makes every game feel different.

The game is played over two eras. At the end of each one you score your links and flipped industries; between them, level 1 tiles are removed and the table is reset. The winner is the player with the most points after the Rail Era.

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; strategies are editorial proposals pending review.

Teaching Guide + FAQ (Roxley, 2023); setup completed with the official rulebook (EOG v1.2, 2019) · Reviewed: 23 Oct 2026