Shannon Appelcline: Brass Tacks

Brass was Martin Wallace’s last board game release of 2007. Moving away from his war gaming themes of recent years, Brass instead returns Wallace to his most successful area of design: logistical gaming. This time he’s focused the game on his native Britain, detailing the Industrial Revolution in Lancashire—which is to say northwestern England.

I was really wowed by Brass when I first played it. It’s rare that a game of this length and complexity has me returning for more, but the economic modeling and strategies of Brass are both unique enough that I thought they deserved the attention. And thus it’s those exact two topics that I’m going to be looking into in more depth today.

If you’re not familiar with Brass, I invite you to take a look at my review of the game, which as usual contains an extensive description of how it plays. Or, if you prefer, you can read Greg J. Schloesser’s review right here at BGN. But now, let’s get down to the brass tacks of Brass.

It's The Economy

Logistical games are certainly nothing new on the European scene. The grand-daddy of gateways, The Settlers of Catan, is itself an economic game. It's not played with money, sure, but you collect resources of other types, you use those to build industries, and in turn those industries give you new resources (or victory points).

However, the standard model of industry as depicted in European games is, at best ... simplistic. Take Settlers. You spend some resources, and you build an industry. Then you get to take all the advantages of that new industry without any further costs. There's no upkeep cost, no running cost, no struggle to break even. You don't have to sell your goods to other players (though trading somewhat abstracts that). To be clear, I don't have any problem with The Settlers of Catan. It's a fun, well-designed game. However, It doesn't even come close to emulating a real economy.

Talking about Settlers in this regard is kind of a straw man, but even games that focus more heavily on logistics don't tend to offer very realistic economic modeling. Just running through some of my recent reviews, The Market of Alturien and China Rails are both economic games using the same model: There's an upfront cost for building an industry, and after that, you're in the clear to take any advantage of it as you want.

(And to be sure, this simplistic economic model isn't unique to board games; from Sid Meier's Civilization onward, computer games have similarly been about paying one-time costs to build working industries.)

Maybe at the core level there's nothing wrong with this model. After all, games are about abstraction—about winnowing down the essence of something to its pure gameable core. However, when we see a model that so poorly addresses the reality of a real-world system, it suggests that there's room for something more ...

What makes Brass truly unique is that it offers a more realistic economic model. You spend money to build industries, but you're not done then. In order to gain victory points and income from your industry, you have to get it running at maximum capacity. You do that by making deals to sell your coal and iron, to make use of your port, and to ship your cotton. It's all highly abstracted, with these "deals" actually represented by simple mechanics, but nonetheless the theming is obvious. You're uniquely creating not just individual industries, but instead a cross-connected and viable economy.

This is all theoretically what was done in Wallace's Age of Steam as well, but here it's forefront and obvious, and it's a large part of what makes Brass a really special game: It shakes up the ideas of how a logistical game should work.

It's The Industries

Having now talked some about Brass and why I think it's a generally cool and original game, I want to talk about the real brass tacks: the specifics that will help you win the game, and that's all in the industries. There are five in all, and each one has its unique advantages and disadvantages, not only as a whole, but also at different levels of tech development. Unfortunately the result is somewhat opaque: it's not immediately obvious which industries you should build when to get what results. Thus, I've broken down Brass' five industries by tech level to take a look at what makes them tick.

Each chart below shows the name of each industry (including number of tiles available per tech level). Each chart is then broken into rows by tech level (TL) listing the cost of each industry (including cubes), what it takes to flip the industry, the income generated (including a cost ratio), and the VPs generated (including a cost ratio). For cost I consider each required cube to increase the cost by one for purposes of calculating ratios, which definitely isn't correct in all cases, but isn't a bad average For ratios, the listed income-to-cost ratio is vitally important for increasing your income. The listed VP-to-cost ratio is somewhat important for seeing how to gain victory points, but so is the total VPs you can get from an industry, which is essentially a VP-to-turn ratio. I'll talk about both.

Coal [2x]	Cost	Flip	Income	Ratio	VPs	Ratio
TL 1	5	2 cubes	4	.8	1	.2
TL 2	7	3 cubes	7	1	2	.29
TL 3	8i	4 cubes	6	.67	3	.33
TL 4	10i	5 cubes	5	.45	4	.36

Coal is notable because it's the best money maker in the game. When you want to start moving up the income track there's no better choice, although ports become par very late in the game (when you probably don't care anyway).

However, coal does have two major gotchas.

First, it's a pretty terrible victory point generator, offering the worst cost-to-VP and turn-to-VP ratios at every single level of tech development. You should be using coal mines to generate either income or coal needed for projects, not to gain points on their own, and doing otherwise is a recipe for failure (as I can attest to from my second game of Brass).

Second, coal can be pretty hard to get rid of during the Age of Canals. There will probably only be 2-5 coal cubes spent in that era, for a single shipyard, one or two iron works, and a couple of TL2+ cotton mills. If you can get the first coal mine or two out, you're gold, but otherwise they're just long-term investments, meaning that they better be TL2+ and you'd better not need the income before the Age of Rail starts.

For TL Development coal has a weird discontinuity—there's actually only one coal mine at TL1, and that TL1 coal mine is a bit worse than the others: its VP value is considerably lower, and there's also a rare jump up in income from TL1 to TL2 (whereas usually the income ratio decreases from one TL to another). This isn't a big deal, but if you are going to take the development action in the Age of Canals, you might want to skip the TL1 coal mine.

Cotton [3x]	Cost	Flip	Income	Ratio	VPs	Ratio
TL 1	12	action	5	.42	3	.25
TL 2	14c	action	4	.26	5	.33
TL 3	16ci	action	3	.17	9	.5
TL 4	18ci	action	2	.10	12	.6

Cotton is suggested by the Brass strategy guide as the work horse for starting the game, and though it's got its strengths, it's definitely not the be-all and end-all of industries. On the plus side, it's a pretty good money maker at TL1. Later, at TL3+, it's got one of the better VP-to-cost ratios and the second best VP-to-turn ratio (behind only TL2 shipyards). The fact that you always have to spend an extra turn selling your cotton doesn't really hurt its performance in the VP-to-turn race because there's also some wasted turns developing shipyards, as we'll see. Also remember, that with a bit of brinkmanship, you can sell from multiple cotton mills on a single turn, further improving their efficacy.

For TL Development it's that level between good money making and good VP making that you really have to watch: TL2. It's the worst income generator at TL2 other than the shipyards (which don't really generate income), and it's the worst VP generator at TL2 other than coal (which really doesn't generate VPs). Thus you have to make a serious decision when you finish with your TL1 cotton mills: do you develop through TL2, do you grit your teeth and build them, or do you decide that your game is going in such a way that you can move toward other things? Even if you decide to develop, things aren't that great either because there are three tiles at each TL, and thus you can't get through all of them as one action.

(Fortunately, there are a lot of possible singletons to develop: the TL1 coal mine, the TL1 iron foundry, and the extra TL1 shipyard.)

If it weren't for this notable discontinuity at TL2, cotton mills would be a really nice industry, because of the movement from high income to high VPs, but that's probably exactly why the discontinuity exists.

Iron [1x]	Cost	Flip	Income	Ratio	VPs	Ratio
TL 1	5c	4 cubes	3	.5	3	.5
TL 2	7c	4 cubes	3	.38	5	.63
TL 3	9c	5 cubes	2	.22	7	.70
TL 4	12c	6 cubes	1	.08	9	.69

Iron is all-around good (though not great). At TL1-2 it's the third best money-maker, following coal and ports and it's similarly the third-best VP generator across the board, following ports and ships. Its biggest advantage is that if built cleverly you don't have to expend extra energy to flip the tile, because the cubes will often get used, especially if you have an iron monopoly.

I wouldn't suggest building iron foundries if there's a glut of them on the market, but if you're the first in, or the market continues to remain under-served, they're a terrific investment. In fact, I'd suggest building them just-in-time, when the iron demand track is no more than a few spaces down, because otherwise other players will start getting into the market, which you'd prefer to keep to yourself.

For TL Development I'm somewhat loathe to suggest developing at all because you only get four of these precious tiles, however one must consider the fact that the TL1 tile is going to go away at the end of the Age of Canals, halving its VP value. If you're using iron as an income generator, you probably want to play both TL1 and TL2 tiles, but if not, and especially if you're already doing a development action, it might be worth passing that first tile by.

Ports [2x]	Cost	Flip	Income	Ratio	VPs	Ratio
TL 1	6	cotton	3	.5	2	.33
TL 2	7	cotton	3	.43	4	.57
TL 3	8	cotton	4	.5	6	.75
TL 4	9	cotton	4	.45	9	1

Ports surprised me as being the best investment of all the industries—if the conditions are right. They're the second-best money maker, following only the lucrative coal industry, and from TL2-4 they're the best VP generator on a VP-to-cost ratio. Their VP-to-turn ratio is lower because they top out at 9, whereas cotton tops out at 12 and ships top out at 18, but if someone else is flipping your ports, then you win out, because people taking those other routes are spending two actions (build cotton + sell for cotton mills or develop + build shipyard for shipyards) to get that higher total of points, and you're only spending one, effectively doubling your VP-to-turn ratio in relation to them.

The main question in building ports thus comes down to whether you can get other people to flip them or not. I think they're a better first build then cotton mills, and then you wait and see. If they get flipped, build more. If not, build your own cotton mills, ship them to the foreign markets, then after those foreign markets have been destroyed, wait for your opponents to ship to your ports as they should have in the first place.

I don't particularly recommend using TL Development to skip ports if you're doing a good job of getting them used. Otherwise, if you're going to only build a couple, every level is a notable VP gain, and so it might be nice to get to the higher level ones.

Ships [2x]	Cost	Flip	Income	Ratio	VPs	Ratio
TL 1	16cid	auto	2	.11	10	.56
TL 2	25cid	auto	1	.04	18	.67

Shipyards seem really intimidating because of their TL1 10-point value and their TL2 18-point value. However if you look at the VP-to-cost ratios, they're right in the middle of the range set by the other big winners, ports and iron (and only somewhat better than cotton). The VP-to-turn ratio looks great because of the high numbers, but that's deceiving. You must spend a turn developing to build your TL1 shipyard, and then you're only going to get to build one during the Age of Canals, which means you need to develop again to build a TL2 shipyard. The result is that each shipyard effectively costs two turns to build, unless you manage to build both your TL2 shipyards, which is not only tricky, but nonetheless only reduces the turn cost to 1.5 for that era. The end result is that shipyards really aren't much better than the other high VP industries; when you consider that they don't generate income either, they really start to fall out of favor.

Putting it Together

Putting all this together results in the following charts, which should give you some useful advice in your next game of Brass, and allow you better consider the possibilities of the somewhat opaque industries:

Best Money Makers Coal Port Iron (TL1-2) Cotton (TL1)

Best VP Generators Port (TL2-4) Shipyards Iron Cotton (TL3-4)

Best Dev Choices Coal: skip TL1 Cotton: skip TL2 Iron: skip TL1 Ports: if low usage Shipyards: must dev

If you agree or disagree, or you find that these notes do or don't help in your next game of Brass, let me know in the comments below!

Around the Corner

My Trials, Triumphs & Trivialities column, which primarily concentrates on computer games, has returned to some strategic game discussions lately, beginning with last week's Strategic Insights: The Prisoner's Dilemma.

Over at RPGnet I've written three reviews since last time including New Moon (a supplement for The Werewolves of Millers Hollow), Shazamm! (a two-player game), and Memoir '44: Air Pack (a supplement for the two-player game).

Meanwhile I'll be back here in two weeks with a discussion of gaming supplements, no doubt influenced by my recent reviews; I'll see you then. © 2008 Shannon Appelcline

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Comments:

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Shannon Appelcline = Work Horse You’ve been a Geek Buddy of mine for years, as I enjoy your take on games. Thanks for the in depth look on Brass. I finally got around to picking it up, and if we can pull ourselves away from Princes of the Renaissance (also recently acquired) and Agricola, then I think this is the next heavy hitter that will see play. Posted by Dave Kudzma on Jan 17, 2008 at 02:24 AM | #

:O Posted by Robert Ramirez on Jan 17, 2008 at 12:04 PM | #

Shannon, the problem with building early ports and then waiting is that other players will use them to get early access to the foreign markets.  Do you think the benefits of the ports offsets this disadvantage? Posted by Larry Levy on Jan 17, 2008 at 12:17 PM | #

I think it depends on the game. You have to assess where the shortages are, then take advantage of them. If the foreign market dropped out quickly or if players are taking poor advantage of it, those are both additional signs that suggest the building of ports. Though ports are great, analytically, their largest problem is clearly that you have to depend on other people for their most advantageous use. Unless you convince people that you’re the port guy, it’s quite possible you’ll only get to build a couple of ports over the course of the game that other players use. Posted by Shannon Appelcline on Jan 17, 2008 at 12:29 PM | #

The chart for Cotton has a typo: TL 1 grants 5 income. But the ratio is correct; 5/12 =0.42 Posted by Stanley Bourgeois on Jan 31, 2008 at 10:54 PM | #

Also the Cotton Mill TL 2 should have the cost as needing a coal, not an iron. Posted by Stanley Bourgeois on Feb 7, 2008 at 05:22 PM | #

For the record, both of those bugs are fixed; thanks Stanley. I played my first game of Brass since I wrote this article last night, and did my best to pay more attention to the industries--not quite taking advantage of all my lessons learned, but at least as many as I could recall quickly. The result was quite good: I pushed my known money-makers early in the game, then switched off to high level ports and cotton mills at game end. I also devved more than I had previously, for a total of 3 or 4 actions, getting past much of the worst stuff. I ended up with a 3-player score of 202, which was indeed a winner. Posted by Shannon Appelcline on Jun 5, 2008 at 12:25 PM | #

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