Boomforge
Play the guided game
Build
Play a card to place an industry tile on a matching city space. You pay its money cost plus any coal or iron it needs, drawn from the board or bought from the market.
How to play Brass: Birmingham
Brass: Birmingham is a network and economy game for two to four players set in the English Midlands. You build industries, connect them by canal and later by rail, and sell what you make. The player with the most victory points after the second era wins.
This page explains the shape of the game. When you would rather be shown than told, Boomforge has a free guided course that deals a real table and walks you through every rule on it, one action at a time.
Start the free guided courseA turn in one line
Build something, connect it, sell what it makes. Everything else in the game serves that loop.
On your turn you take two actions, and every action discards a card from your hand. In the opening round each player takes one action only. When the deck is empty and every hand is spent, the era ends.
The six actions
Network
Lay a link between two cities: a canal in the first era, a rail in the second. Links decide which merchants, coal, and beer you can reach, and they score points of their own.
Sell
Sell cotton, pottery, or manufactured goods to a connected merchant, spending beer to do it. A sold tile flips face up, pays its victory points at scoring, and raises your income.
Loan
Take money now and drop levels on the income track. Early loans are normal play: the money buys tiles that pay for themselves long before the game ends.
Develop
Burn iron to remove the weakest tile from your player mat so the stronger one underneath becomes available. Your mat, not the board, is what limits what you can build.
Scout
Discard cards to take two wild cards that can stand for any city or any industry. It is a rescue for a dead hand, not an opening move.
Coal, iron, and beer
The three resources behave differently, and telling them apart is most of what separates a first game from a second one.
- Coal must come from a mine you are connected to, or from the market if you are connected to one. Distance matters.
- Iron comes from any ironworks anywhere on the board, connected or not, and otherwise from the market.
- Beer comes from your own breweries first, and from another player’s only where your networks meet. Merchants also hold a barrel that can pay for one sale.
Building a mine or an ironworks puts its cubes onto the board for everyone to draw from, and selling into an empty market is how the market price recovers.
The era change
The game is played twice over the same map. When the Canal era ends, links and flipped tiles are scored, then every canal and every level 1 industry is removed from the board. The Rail era begins on the cleared map with a new deck, rail links instead of canals, and the option to build two links at once by spending coal and beer.
Scoring
Points are counted at the end of each era, and only from what is on the board. A flipped industry tile pays the victory points printed on it. A link pays for the icons of the cities it touches, so a link between two busy towns is worth far more than the same link laid early beside empty ones. Money left over is worth almost nothing, and unflipped tiles score nothing at all.
Learn it in 25 minutes
Boomforge’s guided course deals the real table and teaches the game on it. Every move you make goes through the same rules engine a live game uses, so nothing you learn there has to be unlearned. It is free, needs no sign-up, and remembers where you stopped.
- Part 1, about 15 minutes. The screen, the goal, the Build, Connect and Sell loop, all six actions, and a real turn against real opponents.
- Part 2, about 10 minutes. Resources in detail, your player mat, overbuilding, income, turn order, the era change, and the double rail.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to learn Brass: Birmingham?
About 25 minutes with the guided course: 15 minutes for the basics and 10 for the rest of the rules. A full game takes longer, and playing one against bots is the fastest way to make the rules stick.
How many players do you need?
Two to four. Boomforge fills empty seats with bots at Easy, Standard, or Hard difficulty, so you can play a full table alone.
How do you win?
With the most victory points after the Rail era is scored. Points come from flipped industry tiles and from the links you own, counted at the end of each era.
Do I need to download anything?
No. Boomforge runs in a modern browser, and guests can play without creating an account.
Boomforge is an independent, unofficial browser platform and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publishers of Brass: Birmingham. Its branding, interface, and visual assets are original.