Selling in Brass: Birmingham: Merchants, Beer, and Bonuses

Half the industries in Brass: Birmingham never flip on their own. Cotton mills, manufacturers, and potteries sit on the board scoring nothing until you take a Sell action. That makes the merchants around the edge of the board some of the most important spaces in the game, and they change every time you play.

The merchants change every game

At setup, the merchant tiles are shuffled and placed face up on the merchant spaces marked for your player count. Each tile shows the goods that merchant will buy. Some tiles are blank and buy nothing. A merchant location can hold more than one tile, and each tile works on its own.

Player count decides which merchant locations are in play. With 2 players, Warrington and Nottingham get no merchant tiles. With 3, Nottingham gets none. With 4, every merchant space is filled.

So the first strategic act of every game happens before the first turn: look at the merchants. Which goods have several buyers? Which have one, or none nearby? A great cotton plan on a board where the only cotton buyer sits in a far corner is a plan that needs a lot of canals.

How a Sell action works

Discard any card. Then choose one of your unflipped cotton mills, manufacturers, or potteries that is connected to a merchant tile showing that industry’s icon. Pay the beer shown in the tile’s top right corner, if any. Flip the tile and move your income marker up the number of spaces shown on it.

Then you may repeat that for another unflipped goods tile, of the same industry or a different one, until you stop. One Sell action can flip several tiles, each to whichever connected merchant buys it.

If you cannot pay the beer a tile needs, you cannot sell that tile.

Where the beer comes from

Each barrel can come from a different place:

• Your own brewery, anywhere on the board. No connection needed.
• A rival’s brewery, if it is connected to the tile you are selling.
• The barrel beside the merchant tile you are selling to, if one is there.

Beer needs vary. Every cotton mill needs 1 barrel. Potteries need 1 or 2. Manufacturers vary the most: level 5 needs 2, and levels 3 and 7 need none at all. Check the corner of the tile on your mat before you build it.

Merchant beer and its bonus

At setup, one barrel goes beside each merchant tile that is not blank. When you sell to that merchant, you may use that barrel for one of your tile’s beer, and if you do, you also collect the bonus printed by that merchant location:

The Gloucester Develop cannot remove a pottery tile with a lightbulb icon.

Merchant barrels do not come back during an era. Once one is used, that merchant has no beer until the end of the Canal Era, when every empty merchant beer space is refilled for the Rail Era. The player who sells first gets the barrel and the bonus. Everyone after pays full price in beer.

Why a Sell is cheap to take

A Sell costs no money. Only the beer is consumed. That matters for turn order: whoever spends the least in a round goes first in the next. A turn of two Sell actions, or a Sell and a Loan, can put you at the front of the next round, ready to take the merchant barrel you were eyeing. The turn order lesson in Level 2 shows how to plan that.

Selling well

• Batch your sells. Two tiles flipped in one Sell action cost one action and one card. Two Sells cost two.
• Build within reach of a buyer. A goods tile that is not connected to a merchant who wants it scores nothing. Count the links you will need before you build.
• Watch the barrel, not just the tile. If a rival is one action from selling to the same merchant, sell first or plan your own beer.
• Count the links too. Every merchant location shows 2 link icons, so a link into a merchant pays you at the end of the era, even if you never sell there. The link scoring lesson has the math.