Playing Brass: Birmingham Inside Three Hours

At the World Boardgaming Championships, the Brass event runs three-hour rounds. Roxley puts the game at 60 to 120 minutes, but that is for players who know it well, and tournament tables are full of players thinking hard. Playing well in a tournament means playing well on time. This lesson is about that.

The action budget

With 4 players, each player takes 15 actions in the Canal Era and 16 in the Rail Era: 31 each, 124 for the table. Three hours is 180 minutes. If nothing else took time, that would be about 87 seconds per action. But setup, era scoring, the reset between eras, and the final count all come out of the same three hours.

So the working budget is closer to a minute per action, and the table shares it. One player who takes five minutes over a turn has used the time of several turns of everyone else’s.

Where the time goes

Turns are not equal. In most games, the slowest stretches are predictable:

• The first Rail Era round, when the board is clear and everyone rebuilds a network.
• Rounds with a key sell, when a player works out beer from three sources.
• The last two rounds of each era, when every action is counted.

The fastest are the first Canal Era round, with its single action, and the middle of each era, when plans are already in motion.

Think on other players’ turns

The single biggest saving is planning before your turn. While others play, work out your two actions and their sources: the card, the money, the coal, the iron, the beer. When your turn comes, check that nothing changed, and play.

What can change your plan is short: a rival takes the space you wanted, empties the coal mine you counted on, uses the merchant barrel, or connects a route that changes which coal mine is closest. Watch for those four things during each turn before yours, and you will rarely start your own turn from scratch.

Fast, accurate era scoring

Era scoring is where tired tables lose both time and points. Use the same order every time, and give each step to one player:

1. Links, one player at a time. Each player lifts their own links one by one, saying the icon count out loud, and moves their VP marker. Links leave the board as they score.
2. Flipped tiles. Each player scores their own flipped tiles.
3. Canal Era only: the reset. One player removes level 1 tiles; another refills merchant beer; a third shuffles every discard pile into the new deck, turning over the face-down setup cards first.

Saying the counts out loud catches mistakes, and everyone checks everyone. Scoring links before removing any level 1 tiles matters: those tiles still count for links in the Canal Era.

Habits that save minutes

• Spend money onto your character tile as you go. End-of-round turn order then takes seconds.
• Collect income at once. Each player takes their own, read from their own marker.
• Refill your hand at the end of your turn, not at the start of your next one.
• Keep the markets tidy. Cubes back to the supply as soon as they are used.

Practicing on a clock

You can practice pace without a tournament. Play a four-player game with a visible timer and a target: Canal Era done in 75 minutes, say, and the whole game in three hours. Treat the numbers as a training goal, not a rule. Over a few games, the table learns what a three-hour game feels like, and the long turns start to stand out.

The analysis paralysis article has more ways to keep a heavy game moving without rushing anyone.