Transportation

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.

The station is jam-packed full of excited people ready to ride the rails. Mason is off to Chicago, Ashley to Denver, and Hunter is going all the way to San Francisco. The train arrives, and passengers start detraining the sleeper cars with the red-capped porters expertly loading their luggage onto the baggage carts. Enthusiastic travelers crowd the doors, anxiously anticipating their adventure cruising across America in style!

In Ride the Rails, you will invest in railroad companies, build railway track across the United States, and deliver passengers to as many cities as possible. Each round, a new railroad company is introduced to the game, and each railroad company has its own special placement rules! Deliver passengers to as many cities as possible to earn the most points. Be cautious in your travels as shareholders of railroads that you use will also earn points!

Ride the Rails is the second title in the Iron Rail series by Capstone Games.

—description from the publisher

Game description from the publisher:

In Empire Express, designed to be an easy-to-play introduction to the Empire Builder series of games, players create competing railroad empires by drawing railroad tracks with crayons upon an erasable board. You win if you utilize your network of rail lines to acquire and deliver goods efficiently to accumulate the largest personal fortune!

The base game provides pre-programmed routes on a board depicting a north-eastern portion of the U.S. with demand cards providing players with an easy way to learn the system through play. Players start with the bare bones of a railroad: an empty train and track connecting some cities. Each turn you and your fellow players take turns building track, operating trains, and delivering loads. The bank will pay you for each delivered load.

With the starting route guided by the board, only two loads per card, and a visual pick-up and delivery guide on every card, the learning curve is greatly shortened.

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.

It's been almost one hundred years since the Scorpius system was settled. Over the decades, the Government has taken control of everything. Tens of billions of Sentients live in Scorpius with no hope of advancement, no hope of escape — except that not everyone in the Government toes the line.

Some still believe in freedom. A few bold freighter captains use the system against itself, handling their sanctioned job duties...as well as a lot of extracurricular activities like smuggling restricted medicines, passing censored information, and facilitating transactions below the Government radar. They are fueling the revolution.

And the revolution is coming.

In Scorpius Freighter, you are a rebellious freighter captain smuggling goods and information to thwart the oppressive government.

Recruit crew: From the back alley brute to the elite educated, they are the best at what they do.
Customize ships: Outfit your standard sanctioned freighter with hidden holds and an upgraded cockpit.
Smuggle goods: Conduct illegal transactions while dodging the authorities.