Country: England

Brass: Birmingham is an economic strategy game sequel to Martin Wallace' 2007 masterpiece, Brass. Birmingham tells the story of competing entrepreneurs in Birmingham during the industrial revolution, between the years of 1770-1870.

As in its predecessor, you must develop, build, and establish your industries and network, in an effort to exploit low or high market demands.

Each round, players take turns according to the turn order track, receiving two actions to perform any of the following actions (found in the original game):

1) Build - Pay required resources and place an industry tile.
2) Network - Add a rail / canal link, expanding your network.
3) Develop - Increase the VP value of an industry.
4) Sell - Sell your cotton, manufactured goods and pottery.
5) Loan - Take a £30 loan and reduce your income.

Brass: Birmingham also features a new sixth action:

6) Scout - Discard three cards and take a wild location and wild industry card. (This action replaces Double Action Build in original Brass.)

The game is played over two halves: the canal era (years 1770-1830) and the rail era (years 1830-1870). To win the game, score the most VPs. VPs are counted at the end of each half for the canals, rails and established (flipped) industry tiles.

Birmingham features dynamic scoring canals/rails. Instead of each flipped industry tile giving a static 1 VP to all connected canals and rails, many industries give 0 or even 2 VPs. This provides players with the opportunity to score much higher value canals in the first era, and creates interesting strategy with industry placement.

Iron, coal, and cotton are three industries which appear in both the original Brass as well as in Brass: Birmingham.

New "Sell" system

Brewing has become a fundamental part of the culture in Birmingham. You must now sell your product through traders located around the edges of the board. Each of these traders is looking for a specific type of good each game. To sell cotton, pottery, or manufactured goods to these traders, you must also "grease the wheels of industry" by consuming beer. For example, a level 1 cotton mill requires one beer to flip. As an incentive to sell early, the first player to sell to a trader receives free beer.

Birmingham features three all-new industry types:

Brewery - Produces precious beer barrels required to sell goods.

Manufactured goods - Function like cotton, but features eight levels. Each level of manufactured goods provides unique rewards, rather than just escalating in VPs, making it a more versatile (yet potentially more difficult) path vs cotton.

Pottery - These behemoths of Birmingham offer huge VPs, but at a huge cost and need to plan.

Increased Coal and Iron Market size - The price of coal and iron can now go up to £8 per cube, and it's not uncommon.

Brass: Birmingham is a sequel to Brass. It offers a very different story arc and experience from its predecessor.

You are the head of a respected but troubled family estate in mid-19th century Victorian England. After several lean decades, family fortunes are looking up! Your goal is to improve your estate so as to be in better standing with the truly influential families in Derbyshire.

Obsession is a game of 16 to 20 turns in which players build a deck of Victorian gentry (British social upper class), renovate their estate by acquiring building tiles from a centralized builders' market, and manipulate an extensive service staff of butlers, housekeepers, underbutlers, maids, valets, and footmen utilizing a novel worker placement mechanic. Successfully hosting prestigious social activities such as Fox Hunts, Music Recitals, Billiards, Political Debates, and Grand Balls increases a player's wealth, reputation, and connections among the elite.

Each turn, players choose a building tile representing a room or outdoor space in and around their 19th century British country house. The tile chosen dictates the event that can be hosted and the guests to be invited. Players must carefully plan, however, to have the proper staff available to service the event and support guests as needed. The reward for success is new investment opportunities, permitting further renovation of the estate (acquisition of more valuable/powerful building tiles), an increase in reputation in the county, an expanding circle of influential acquaintances, and a larger and highly-trained domestic staff.

Throughout the game, a competitive courtship for the hand of the most eligible young gentleman and lady in the county presents specific renovation and reputation objectives. The player who best meets these objectives while accumulating victory points will win the hand of the wealthy love interest and the game.

—description from the publisher

Brass: Lancashire — first published as Brass — is an economic strategy game that tells the story of competing cotton entrepreneurs in Lancashire during the industrial revolution. You must develop, build, and establish your industries and network so that you can capitalize demand for iron, coal and cotton. The game is played over two halves: the canal phase and the rail phase. To win the game, score the most victory points (VPs), which are counted at the end of each half. VPs are gained from your canals, rails, and established (flipped) industry tiles. Each round, players take turns according to the turn order track, receiving two actions to perform any of the following:

Build an industry tile
Build a rail or canal
Develop an industry
Sell cotton
Take a loan

At the end of a player's turn, they replace the two cards they played with two more from the deck. Turn order is determined by how much money a player spent on the previous turn, from lowest spent first to highest spent. This turn order mechanism opens some strategic options for players going later in the turn order, allowing for the possibility of back-to-back turns.

After all the cards have been played the first time (with the deck size being adjusted for the number of players), the canal phase ends and a scoring round commences. After scoring, all canals and all of the lowest level industries are removed for the game, after which new cards are dealt and the rail phase begins. During this phase, players may now occupy more than one location in a city and a double-connection build (though expensive) is possible. At the end of the rail phase, another scoring round takes place, then a winner is crowned.

The cards limit where you can build your industries, but any card can be used for the develop, sell cotton or build connections actions. This leads to a strategic timing/storing of cards. Resources are common so that if one player builds a rail line (which requires coal) they have to use the coal from the nearest source, which may be an opponent's coal mine, which in turn gets that coal mine closer to scoring (i.e., being utilized).

Brass: Lancashire, the 2018 edition from Roxley Games, reboots the original Warfrog Games edition of Brass with new artwork and components, as well as a few rules changes:

The virtual link rules between Birkenhead have been made optional.
The three-player experience has been brought closer to the ideal experience of four players by shortening each half of the game by one round and tuning the deck and distant market tiles slightly to ensure a consistent experience.
Two-player rules have been created and are playable without the need for an alternate board.
The level 1 cotton mill is now worth 5 VP to make it slightly less terrible.

Spyrium is set in an alternate world, an England set in a steampunk-based universe. Players build factories, needing workers to manage the production of a commodity previously unknown to us called "Spyrium". Producing Spyrium in one factory, then processing it in the next results in victory points (VPs) for that particular player. Alternatively, Spyrium can be purchased, but the material is rare and expensive, and players are constantly scraping for money.

Only those who from the beginning of the game manage to increase their regular income or their base of permanently employed workers (who can be used again and again to raise money) will be flexible enough to get their hands on the important end-of-game buildings to generate many VPs.

The circular nature of the game is flexible as each player can decide for himself when to move out of the placement phase and into the activation phase. With the two tracks in the game, those involved with delivery during the worker phase can then be used to raise money, to purchase an adjacent card, or to work on their own in an idle factory. All of these things are important, but in the end only the player who has dealt best with the lack of money, workers and Spyrium will win.

London, 1901. At the world famous Portobello Market, the goal in the morning is to secure the best places to build stalls. Try to place your stalls in the most lucrative manner, cut off your opponents, and grab the most profitable alleys for yourself. You can build only where the Bobby stands—but a little cash will make the Bobby stand where you want him to!

East India Railway was the prototype title for this game, and it became Portobello Market when published by Schmidt.