Brass Empire 

• Designer: Mike Gnade
• Publisher: Rock Manor Games
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 14+
• Time: 60 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Brass Empire is a steampunk-themed deck-building game where each player takes on the role of a different corporation to hire the best employees, construct buildings, and manufacture steam-powered machines. Players battle and sabotage each other to amass economic wealth and influence to win the game.

Overview: Welcome to the steampunk world of Cobalt. For centuries, Cobalt has been ruled by corporations seeking to enhance their wealth and influence with Brass. Brass doesn’t just fuel the economy but literally fuels the technology and transportation of the world through its unique thermodynamic properties. Every day these companies compete and battle to expand their territory and authority. Companies work to optimize their labor force and resources to mine the most Brass in each territory through corporate espionage, technology, security, and even sabotage. You work for such a company and have been tasked with expanding into a new region by constructing new corporate buildings, hiring employees, and battling other companies in the area. The player who earns the most Brass will lead his company to victory in the region.

Each turn, you will play Employee cards from your hand to gain resources. These resources will allow you to acquire new Employees, Buildings and Units for your deck. Along the way, you will acquire buildings to enhance your hold on the region and command units to attack other companies and mine for Brass. At the end of the game, the player with the most Brass is the winner.

To start the game, each player gets an identical starter deck of 10 cards as well as a Mining Platform that starts on the table.  Players shuffle their starting deck, drawing a hand of 5 cards, and leaving the remaining 5 cards as their deck.  Each player also then chooses one of the 5 different Corporation decks (6 cards each) – places them to the side of their area.  The bulk of the cards are in the Labor Market deck and the Design Department deck. Each is shuffled, and a market a 6 face up cards is made for each.  Finally, make the Brass supply on the table, placing 15-25 Brass tokens per player; the amount chosen will affect the game length. 

There are a few phases to each player turn:

Start Phase: flip any buildings under construction to their face up side and resolve any “when built” actions.

Play Phase:  There is no cost to playing cards from your hand. Play employee cards from your hand to generate Labor, Construction and/or Brass.  You can spend these resources to buy new cards from the two card markets and/or from your personal Corporation reserve deck.  Any purchased cards are placed on your discard pile.  The two markets are immediately replenished if a card is bought from them.   Play unit cards face up in front of you – they cannot attack on the first turn they are played. Play building cards face down. They will be fully built at the start of your next turn.  

Action Phase: any units played on an earlier turn can now either Mine for Brass (if your Mining Platform is active) or attack another unit.   When  units mine for brass, they collect Brass equal to their attack power.  Your Mining Platform can always be rebuilt for 1 Construction point.  If you attack another unit or building, you announce your target, and that card takes damage; if not fully destroyed, mark the damage with a die.  If destroyed AND if your mining platform is active, you gain Brass equal to the card’s Brass Value (min 1), and that card is placed in its owner’s discard pile.  

End Turn: Place all your played employee cards in your discard pile.  Discard the rest of your hand.  Draw five new cards from your deck, shuffling your discards into a new deck if necessary.

Play continues around the table until the Brass pool is exhausted.  Play to the end of the round so that all players have an equal number of turns. It is still possible to earn Brass though the pool is out; there should be enough extras for this.

Players calculate their score: the Brass collected throughout the game as well as the Brass value of all their cards (see the lower left corner for a Brass Value).  The highest score wins. No tiebreaker is mentioned.

My thoughts on the game

So, the game is new to me, but researching on the Interwebs shows this to be the second edition of the game – the original coming out in 2016.  It appears that there were a few changes made in the name of game balance, but on the whole, the overall experience is similar between the versions.   If you have the original, here is a list of changes from the designer: https://rockmanorgames.com/2017/10/25/differences-brass-empire-1st-2nd-edition/

I’m a fan of all deckbuilders, so I’m always ready to try out a new one and see what it brings to the table.  Here, you have three main ways of gaining Brass (VPs):  adding cards to your deck, mining with units, destroying other cards with your units.  The market is refreshed after people buy cards, so there is a bit of luck / tactical shifting necessary as your future plans are often dictated by what cards you’re able to buy at the moment of your turn.  Of course, if people don’t buy cards, there is no way to otherwise wipe the market.  We spent much of one game with 10 of the same 12 cards stuck in the market because no one wanted to buy them.

I do like the way that each player gets their own specialized Corporation market to buy from – in that way, you do have a modicum of fixed strategy.  I’d definitely recommend going through your six cards to see what they do, and then always keeping them in mind when it’s time to  buy cards.  Hopefully you can find cards in the regular market that mesh with your special cards.

The rules are honestly a bit of a mish-mash, I think everything is in the rulebook, but man it’s in a weird order.  The setup comes first, then a few pages to explain the four main types of cards, and then, of all things, a full page of “some example turns from a 2-player game”.  Umm, wait a minute – you haven’t told me how to play yet?!  Then a full page of some specific rules about the game on the next page. But yet, you still don’t know how to play?  Once you get the deets on how to play – which is quite abbreviated and assumes that you know how to play other deckbuilders, there are some variants and then solo rules; next come a few pages of fluff worldbuilding text, and then finally you get a glossary that explains the rest of the card terms (which you actually need to play the game).  Overall, just a very odd arrangement of information on the pages and one that I think would be very confusing to a newbie.  Just read the rules in the wrong order.  I’d recommend the following page order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 18, 10, 12, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20.

Ergonomically, the cards also could have been better for me.  You have four different sorts of cards: starter cards, corporation cards, Labor Market cards and Design Department cards.  The only thing that tells them apart is the text in the oval found near the midpoint of the card and the fact that units/buildings have health stats.  Seriously, this is a beast to clean up correctly.  Don’t make me read 200 cards.  Surely there could have been some graphic design element – an icon in the corner, a different shaped border, or anything really – to allow for the quick sorting of the cards. Also, this would prevent errors of cards ending up in the wrong deck; etc.  Trying to fish out the cards into the right decks in cleanup takes way longer than it should, and then, as I don’t trust myself to do it right, we always have to run through the decks again when we set it up again.   

Another issue with the cards is that the Brass Value and the Attack/Defense numbers are way small in the bottom of the cards; and I had a hard time reading them from across the table.  I would have preferred these to be larger, as we were constantly having to ask people what their cards’ stats were when trying to decide whether to attack or what to attack.

Those issues aside, the game (as I think it’s supposed to be played) is a loose back and forth experience.  You play cards, trying to balance your hand between employees which you need for resources and units/buildings that you can build to do things.  And then once you have units built, you’ll often be torn between using them for mining (straight VP) versus attacking (which generates VPs if successful, though it can also damage your own cards).  If you attack, almost always, you start by blowing up someone’s Mining Platform.  They’re not hard to kill, you get a brass from it, and then that player can’t score any Brass until their turn rolls around again and they spend the Construction point to flip it back over.  Cards move in and out of play quickly, so you’re always faced with a new situation each time your turn comes up.

It seems to play differently with 2p and higher player counts – mostly due to the cumulative damage.  At least in our group, stronger units/buildings seem to last longer in a multiplayer game, because unless someone is able to defeat it in a single turn, your card is unlikely to be attacked.  It doesn’t make sense to partially damage a card just so that the next player can swoop in and finish off the card and make off with the Brass bonus while you get nothing.

If you’re a fan of deckbuilding games, this one definitely offers a few different things while feeling familiar at the same time.  If you like the fighting sort of deckbuilder (Arctic Scavengers, Star Realms, etc), this one will likely appeal to you.  I’ve also had some challenging games against the solo AI, and that’s a nice feature that a lot of deckbuilders don’t provide…  There are still a few rough edges, but maybe the next version of the game will get those cleaned up.  

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor