The pain in my Brass
At the time of writing, the number one game on Board Game Geek is Brass: Birmingham – the greatest board game of all time. It is also a game that is both about and brings out the absolute worst in human nature.
There are many games set in the Industrial Revolution, but only Brass makes you feel as if an underpaid worker is shovelling your brain into a furnace, like one of its little fibreboard cubes of pretend coal.
Up next, Brass: Slough.
If you are not familiar with Brass or its various iterations, it is a resource and economic management board game about the logistics of English manufacturing and transport networks set between 1770 and 1870. If that sounds dry, it is. In fact, at first glance there is nothing about Brass that seems deserving of its status. Its art design is as dark and unwelcoming as a Birmingham winter’s day. This hate machine does not even care about being pretty.
And behind this drab façade is an unremarkable set of mechanics, superficially simple enough for anyone with high school-level mathematics to understand. But look closer. These mechanics are in fact a cold black heart of tightly wound clockwork, precision tooled to produce two things: victory points and pain.
Am I exaggerating for dramatic effect? Only a little. Let’s say you want to build a building and you need coal, but there’s no coal in your network, so you need to build a link to the coal, but that also costs coal, or beer, then there’s a race for the beer, so you use someone else’s beer, which earns you no friends, and it turns out you can’t build that building anyway because it isn’t in your network either, and no one else has made any iron and you still don’t have any coal…
And this is happening in an environment of such infuriating scarcity that, despite playing as a captain of industry during an economic boom, players never feel as if they are being anything other than remorselessly screwed, like Scott Cam building his millionth shitty Balinese patio. This is largely a function of Brass’s end-of-phase scoring systems, which delay gratification until after players have had to painstakingly build a network of canals, which they must then abandon and rebuild from scratch as railways.
While I am at least smart enough to understand that England’s canal transportation age didn’t end because they suddenly ran out of canals, I am unfortunately not smart enough to fully grok Brass’s economic crunch, or truly enjoy the dark secret of its appeal: Brass is the number one board game on Board Game Geek precisely because it is such an engine of cruelty. Players will line up to throw themselves into its gears, for the pleasure of emerging slightly less crushed-to-death than their opponents.
But if you zoom out, fascinatingly, it is also a game about engines of cruelty.
Every year, there are roughly 12 million board games released about the Industrial Revolution. Few of them account for the human suffering or environmental vandalism of that age. This is not a new problem. Board games have always simulated periods of economic exploitation, colonialism and warfare. The larger cultural point being, these games are produced and enjoyed by societies that benefitted from that exploitation, colonialism and warfare. The enshrinement of the Industrial Revolution as a topic worthy of endless simulations is exactly what you would expect from a culture descended from that period’s beneficiaries.
If it’s not yet clear, this is not meant to be a helpful review of Brass. As the tag says, it is a rant. There is irony in replicating Britain’s Industrial Revolution with layered carboard printed in China, where lower wages, and lax environmental and safety regulations let real-world publishers ‘win’ the game of modern capitalism. Life imitating art.
None of this is anyone’s fault, but it’s worth thinking about – particularly for designers who might want to skin their games with something other than the Industrial Revolution. Where’s all the games about black lung disease or unionising the workforce? Don’t tell me that’s any more boring than moving cubes of coal about on canals.
Of course, enjoying these games doesn’t make you a monster… except in the case of Brass, which it absolutely does, because the experience of playing this hideous contraption is so egregious that even the mildest gaming nerd will be transformed into a raging beast of capitalism.