Brass app.

Many of you already have the Ticket to Ride app (for iOS devices or for Android), but if not, it’s been overhauled now, with better graphics, some more board-specific AI players, and an all-in-one in-app purchase that gets you all of the various maps beyond the core U.S. map – Europe, Asia, India, Switzerland – in one purchase. It was already a must-have but it’s even better now.

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Brass is one of the highest-ranked games on Boardgamegeek (#17 overall right now) that I’ve never tried; it was out of print for a while (it’s in print now, $44 new on amazon) and lists a playing time of 2-3 hours, which, since I’m a parent of a fourth grader, isn’t terribly practical right now. (The need to review such games for Paste is why I’ve put out the call for folks in my general area willing to test out some of these longer games with me.) The game, perhaps the best-regarded of all “economic engine” games – where you’re building for immediate points and creating a network that will help you generate more points as the game unfolds – was ripe for an adaptation that speeds setup and does all of the calculations of costs and points for you. Over a year in development, the app finally hit the various online stores last week, and it’s extremely well done if you’re looking for an online experience, but the tutorial is too light and the AI players proved very easy for me, a total novice, to beat. This review covers the iOS version, but it’s also available for Android devices. (There’s an entry for the Android app on amazon, but it’s a fake.)

Players in Brass play 16 turns in two phases set in the Industrial Revolution in England, with the second phase coming after the advent of railroads. Players build four buildings that can produce income as well as points – ports, cotton mills, coal mines, iron works – and must “activate” them by connecting them to networks of canals or rail lines to begin generating revenues. A fifth building, the shipyard, only generates victory points. The exact income and points depend on the “level” you build; you must develop each building type individually over the course of the game to keep up with the times and your opponents. Money is scarce early in the game, but Brass allows players to take loans – as far as I can tell, you can’t get anywhere without it – of up to £30 if you pay 10% interest every turn for the remainder of the game.

In 19th century England, tiny hills were totally impassable.

On each turn, the player gets two actions, choosing from building, developing, taking a loan, shipping cotton (from your own mill to any player’s port), or building a canal/rail link. Players have hands of up to eight cards, with cards showing either one of the towns on the map where players can build or a specific building type; to build, you must discard a card that shows either the town where you want to place the building or that building type, then pay the cost – but in many cases you must also meet another requirement, like having a link to your network or being able to get coal to the building site. You then activate a building by using it – shipping cotton from the mill, shipping it out of a port, providing coal to the network all at once or one bit at a time as you build within the network, or sending a bunch of iron to the market. (Shipyards are activated automatically when built.) Each town allows specific building types; in phase one, you can only have one building in each location, but that’s lifted for phase two. At the end of phase one, all level-one (undeveloped) buildings and all canals disappear; in phase two, you can only build level-two or higher buildings, and can only build rail lines. The AI player always uses its first move of the game to develop ports to level two, so I have adopted the same plan, as it ensures that those ports provide a greater return and stay in place for the remainder of the game. Turn order changes each turn, going in reverse order of spending from the previous turn – if you spent nothing last turn, such as by taking loans with each action, you’ll go first next time around.

Games on the app take about 10-15 minutes, on par with other complex strategy games like Agricola and Caylus. The graphics are clear and bright, the map itself is attractive, and the animations (if you use them) are helpful while you’re learning the game. There are pop-up menus from the sides that can give you all the information you need once you understand what you’re looking for, and I only encountered very minor glitches, such as the app telling me I could ship cotton on some turns when I didn’t have an unactivated cotton mill from which to ship.

The tutorial was a little superficial and didn’t get into some of the details of interactions between buildings or point scoring, so I didn’t understand anything but the basic mechanics and had to learn a lot of the game’s restrictions on building via trial and error. I’ve also found that, once I understood the game, I could beat the AI players every time, even playing against three at once, primarily because they never build shipyards. A level two shipyard is worth 18 points, and there are only three spots on the board where you can build one; with winning scores typically around 100-110, if you build two shipyards, you’re going to win. I haven’t lost any game where I built even one shipyard, in fact. (It also seems to me that there should be at least one shipyard space per player.) I’ve swapped emails with the developers and there will be improved AI players in a later update.

The game itself is very elegant, with a small number of rules and options leading to complex strategic decisions, but has virtually no interaction between players. I found after a few plays that I could simply skip the animations of AI players’ moves and play my own game as if I were going solo. There are rare conflicts over building spaces on the board, and there’s a brief race each phase to ship cotton before the export market’s bottom falls out (which it does, quickly), but otherwise that’s it. The fact that AI players don’t build shipyards means I can wait till the last phase to do so, and even ignoring that, the AI players’ moves didn’t otherwise affect me. You can use anyone’s canals or rail lines, and even ship cotton from someone else’s ports. If you need coal to finish a building, you can take from someone else’s unactivated coal mine; the worst thing that happens is that you take its last piece and activate the mine for your opponent, but that was probably going to happen at some point anyway.

If the designers of Brass – who have had some great blog posts on the process, like explaining their improved method of displaying victory points – improve the AI players, this could be a must-buy for serious boardgamers along the lines of Caylus and Agricola, both of which have AI players that are at least tougher for the novice player. I’d also like to see a tutorial that explains more of the details of building and scoring, so that newbies wouldn’t have to fly so blind for their first few games. But it looks great and plays cleanly, two of the biggest hurdles for new apps that try to implement games of this size and complexity.