The 5 Best Board Games Like Brass: Birmingham

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The best board game like Brass: Birmingham is Barrage, a 1–4 player hydroelectric game that takes Brass’s single best idea — a shared map where your opponents’ construction is part of your economy — and makes it even more direct. After that it depends on which part of Brass hooked you: Power Grid for the shared market, Brass: Lancashire for more of the same system, Food Chain Magnate for the pure no-luck knife fight, and Furnace if the honest problem is that Brass never actually gets to the table.

Brass: Birmingham has sat at or near the top of the hobby’s most-watched ranking for years, which means a lot of people finish their first game slightly dazed and go looking for another one. The recommendations they get back are almost always the same three heavy Euros. We think those three are the wrong answer, and this article is mostly about why — and what to buy instead.

What you actually loved about Brass: Birmingham

Ask for “something like Brass” and you will be handed Terraforming Mars, Gaia Project, or Ark Nova. All three are excellent. All three are the wrong recommendation, and they are wrong in exactly the same way.

In those games you build your engine on your own board. You optimize your own tableau, you take the actions that improve your position, and the other players are, functionally, weather — they change the conditions a little, they take a card you wanted, but you could describe your entire turn without mentioning them. That is a legitimate and wonderful kind of game. It is not what Brass is.

Roxley describes Brass: Birmingham on its own product page as “a competitive, heavy weight, hand management, network building, economic game,” and the phrase carrying the weight there is network building. You develop on one shared map of the West Midlands between 1770 and 1870. The rail and canal links you pay for can be used by everyone. The coal you need in order to build is sitting in a coal mine somebody else built, and when you consume it, their income marker moves up. You sell through merchants the whole table shares. There is no turn in Brass: Birmingham that is only about you.

So the useful question is not “what else is heavy?” — weight is a red herring, and we make that case at length in our heavy Euro board games guide. The useful question is which kind of entanglement did you love? Brass offers four, and almost nobody loves all four equally:

• The shared map. Where you build matters because of where everyone else built.
• The shared market. The price and availability of what you need moves because of what the table is doing.
• The permanent poverty. You are always broke; the income track, not your cash pile, is the real ladder.
• Reading the room. Half of a good turn is correctly guessing what the other three players are about to do.

The five games below are ranked by how completely they deliver on one of those four, not by how heavy they are. Every specification here was checked against the publisher’s own page rather than a retailer listing, and where a publisher does not print a fact, we have left it out rather than guess.

How they compare

Game	Players	Time	Age	Which Brass hook it keeps
Brass: Birmingham (the original)	2–4	60–120 min	14+	All four at once
1. Barrage	1–4	120 min	14+	The shared map
2. Power Grid	2–6	120 min	12+	The shared market
3. Brass: Lancashire	2–4	60–120 min	14+	All four, tighter
4. Food Chain Magnate	2–5	2–4 hours	—	Reading the room
5. Furnace	2–4	30–60 min	14+	The economy, in miniature

Food Chain Magnate’s publisher does not print an age recommendation, so we have not invented one.

1. Barrage — the shared map, weaponized

1–4 players · 120 minutes · ages 14+ · Tommaso Battista and Simone Luciani · Cranio Creations

Barrage is set in an alternate 1930 in which fossil fuels have run out and a group of industrialists races to build the hydroelectric infrastructure that replaces them. You place dams, build conduits down the mountainside, and run water through your powerhouses to fulfill contracts.

Here is why it is the top pick. In Brass, using an opponent’s coal is an economic transaction that quietly helps them. In Barrage, the water is literally flowing downhill through a map everyone is building on, and it is finite. You can spend three turns setting up a beautiful production chain and watch the player above you on the mountain drain the basin you were counting on, on their turn, without malice, because it was the efficient thing for them to do. It is the same feeling as arriving at the Birmingham coal you needed and finding it gone, concentrated into the central mechanism of the game rather than distributed across it.

It is also brutally tight on resources in the way Brass players tend to enjoy. Your construction wheel means the concrete and excavators you spend now come back several turns later, so the game is constantly asking you to commit to things you cannot yet afford — the same permanent-poverty pressure Brass creates with its income track and loans.

Who should skip it: anyone whose favorite thing about Brass was the historical texture. Barrage is dieselpunk, the art is stylized, and it is a colder, more mechanical experience. It is also meaner than Brass — Brass’s interaction is mostly economic, while Barrage’s can feel personal, and groups that bruise easily should look at Power Grid instead. Also skip if 120 minutes is your ceiling rather than your target; Barrage uses all of it, and then some while you are learning.

2. Power Grid — the shared market, at its purest

2–6 players · 120 minutes · ages 12+ · Friedemann Friese · 2F-Spiele

Power Grid is twenty years older than Brass: Birmingham and it is still the cleanest expression of the idea that makes Brass tick. You buy power plants at auction, buy the coal, oil, garbage, and uranium to run them, connect cities on a shared map, and get paid for the cities you can actually power.

The resource market is the whole argument. Fuel sits on a track, and the cheapest units are bought first, so every purchase anybody makes pushes the price up for everyone who comes after. If three players commit to coal plants, coal becomes ruinous and the one player who went uranium quietly wins. You are not optimizing against a rulebook; you are optimizing against four other people’s purchasing decisions, in real time, on a price track you can all see. Brass players recognize that instantly.

The turn order rule is the other reason it belongs here. Whoever is leading goes first in the auction and last in the resource-buying phase, which means success is punished automatically and continuously. It is a rubber band, and it keeps the game close in a way Brass’s two-era scoring also does, by different means.

The current base game is the Recharged Version, a 2019 revision of the 2004 original that 2F-Spiele describes as the definitive edition — rules rewritten, components updated, and compatible with the full run of map expansions. That is the one to buy. It also seats up to six, which none of the other games here manage, and it is the most forgiving entry point on this list at ages 12 and up.

Who should skip it: anyone who loved Brass specifically for the network. Power Grid’s map connections are a cost calculation, not a structure you develop and reuse the way Brass’s links are. The auction phase is also slower and more fiddly than anything in Brass, and if your group agonizes over bids, budget well past two hours.

3. Brass: Lancashire — the same system, meaner

2–4 players · 60–120 minutes · ages 14+ · Martin Wallace · Roxley Games

We want to be straightforward about this one, because “buy the other game in the same series” is the laziest recommendation in the hobby and it is often wrong. Here it is right, with one condition.

Brass: Lancashire is Martin Wallace’s 2008 original, the game Birmingham is a sequel to. Same core ruleset, same canal-then-rail structure, same relentless income economy. What differs is the texture: Lancashire is drier and more austere, built around the cotton trade and a distant market that can refuse your goods entirely. There are no breweries, so the beer economy that softens Birmingham and gives it its social, gift-giving feel is simply absent. Birmingham’s board setup varies between plays; Lancashire’s does not.

The condition is this: if you want something different, do not buy Lancashire. It will feel like Birmingham with the lights turned down. But if what you actually said after your first Brass game was “I want to do that again, harder,” then this is the correct purchase and nothing else on this list is close. Roxley’s own copy calls it “one of the deepest, most replayable economic games ever designed,” and for once that is not marketing. Roxley also rebuilt the two- and three-player rules for this edition so that shorter counts play more like a full game, which is a genuine advantage over Birmingham if you mostly game as a pair.

Who should skip it: anyone who found Birmingham punishing rather than tense. Lancashire is less forgiving, and its distant cotton market can invalidate a plan you have been building for twenty minutes. Skip it too if you own Birmingham and only play a heavy game once a month — you will not get through both.

4. Food Chain Magnate — reading the room instead of the board

2–5 players · 2–4 hours · Splotter Spellen

Food Chain Magnate is a game about building a fast food company: you hire and train staff, run advertising that creates demand in nearby houses, and race to be the one who can actually deliver a burger to a customer who wants one. The box says “100% dice free” and “there’s no such thing as luck, skill wins every time,” and Splotter means both literally — there are no dice, no random draws, and no hidden information beyond what people choose to do.

This is the pick for the fourth hook. If the thing you loved about Brass was the moment you looked at the board, worked out that the player to your left had to build a cotton mill in the next two turns, and got there first, Food Chain Magnate is that feeling for three hours with nothing else in the way. Your advertising creates demand that any player can fill. Your price cut takes customers off everyone. The milestone bonuses are first-come and permanent, so the whole opening is a race for a small set of advantages that only one person can have.

It is the hardest game on this list by a distance, and the failure mode is real: a player who misreads the opening can be functionally out of contention by the third round while the game continues for another two hours. Splotter designs games that expect you to lose the first one badly and come back. Go in knowing that and it is one of the great designs of the last decade; go in expecting Brass’s gentler curve and you will have a bad evening.

Availability, honestly: as of August 2026 Splotter lists Food Chain Magnate as a pre-order for its thirteenth print run, with production expected to finish in late 2026 and shipping starting in early 2027. Copies exist on the secondary market in the meantime, often well above the original price. This is a game to be patient about rather than to overpay for.

Who should skip it: most people, and that is not a criticism. Skip it if your group includes anyone who plays for the theme and the arc rather than the puzzle, if a player being eliminated in spirit two hours before the end would ruin the night, or if you cannot reliably get the same four people to the table twice. It only really opens up on the second and third play.

5. Furnace — the one that actually gets played

2–4 players · 30–60 minutes · ages 14+ · Ivan Lashin · Arcane Wonders

This pick is deliberately not like the others, and it is here for a specific reader.

A large number of people who love Brass: Birmingham play it two or three times a year. The box is heavy, the teach is forty minutes, and you need three other adults with a free evening and a working brain. If that is your situation, then buying Barrage or Food Chain Magnate does not solve your problem — it gives you a second excellent game that also does not get played.

Furnace is a 19th-century industrialist game that runs in half an hour to an hour. Each round you bid discs numbered one to four onto company cards; if you win a card you take it, and — this is the good part — everyone who bid lower and lost gets compensated, receiving the card’s resources or its conversion ability multiplied by their disc value. So losing an auction on purpose, with a high disc, is frequently the strongest move on the table. Then you run your little industrial chain, turning coal into iron into oil into money.

What it preserves from Brass is the specific pleasure of watching a conversion chain you assembled turn raw material into money at a rate that feels illegal. What it drops is the map, the network, and two hours. It is the cheapest game on this list and by far the easiest to get to the table, and a game you play twelve times a year beats a masterpiece you play twice.

Who should skip it: anyone who came here for the shared map, because Furnace does not have one. The interaction is entirely in the auction. If you already own a shelf of mid-weight Euros, this will feel familiar rather than revelatory — it is a very good version of a known thing, not a new one.

What nothing on this list replaces

We should concede the obvious. Brass: Birmingham has a structural trick that none of these five copy: the game is played twice. At the end of the canal era, every link and every low-level industry you built is torn off the board and scored, and then you do it again with railways over the wreckage. Everything you build is temporary and everything you build is scored, which is why the game can feel simultaneously ruthless and generous.

Barrage has no era break. Power Grid escalates but never resets. Lancashire has the same two-era structure — it is the same system — but that is the point at which it stops being an alternative and starts being a second helping. If the two-era wipe is specifically what you loved, the honest answer is that you should play more Brass: Birmingham, and the interesting purchase is not another game at all.

What not to buy expecting Brass: Birmingham

Four games get recommended constantly in this slot and all four will disappoint a Brass player for the same reason — they are engines you build alone.

• Terraforming Mars and Gaia Project. Superb card and faction engines where the shared board is mostly a scoring surface. Buy them because you want a big solvable puzzle, not because you want Brass.
• Ark Nova. Same objection, plus a longer runtime. It is a magnificent tableau game and it is not an economic one.
• Catan. People suggest it because both games involve building routes and trading. Catan’s interaction is negotiation and dice; Brass’s is infrastructure. Different hobby.
• Monopoly and its relatives. “An economic game about property” describes both sentences and nothing else.

If what you want is simply the next step up in difficulty rather than a similar shape, our most playable complicated board games list and our best strategy board games roundup are better starting points than this one.

Is Brass: Birmingham still in print?

Yes, but the edition situation is worth understanding before you buy, and it changed recently.

Roxley currently lists the Retail edition of Brass: Birmingham as limited stock, and states plainly that the Deluxe edition has been retired and will not be reprinted. Its replacement is a Birmingham Collector’s Edition, which Roxley is running through a crowdfunding late-pledge rather than normal retail. Brass: Lancashire, by contrast, is currently in stock in both its Retail and Deluxe versions.

The practical advice: if you want Birmingham on the shelf, the Retail edition plays identically to the Deluxe one — Roxley’s own edition comparison shows the difference is cardboard money versus metal-look chips, the box, and the insert, with all gameplay content identical. Do not pay secondary-market Deluxe prices for a game experience you can buy at retail today. Check current prices and availability before ordering either, since this is exactly the kind of thing that shifts month to month.

Player counts, two-player, and solo

Two players. Brass: Birmingham works at two but is widely considered better with three or four. If two is your normal count, Brass: Lancashire is the stronger buy of the pair — Roxley specifically rebuilt its two- and three-player rules to play more like a full game. Barrage also handles two well. More options in our best two-player board games roundup.

Five or more. Only Power Grid goes past four, seating up to six, which makes it the default answer for a larger group that wants this kind of economic pressure. Food Chain Magnate reaches five but gets very long there.

Solo. Barrage is the only game on this list with a solo mode in the base box, and it is a good one. Brass: Birmingham has no official solo mode. If solo play is the priority, start with our best 1-player board games list instead.

Evening length. Everything here except Furnace is a full-evening commitment, and Food Chain Magnate can run to four hours. Our best long board games guide covers that end of the shelf properly.

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line

Brass: Birmingham is not at the top of the rankings because it is heavy. It is there because it is the most entangled economic game in wide circulation — a game where you cannot take a turn that is only about yourself. Buy for the entanglement you liked, not for the weight class.

Barrage if it was the shared map. Power Grid if it was the shared market, or if you need to seat five or six. Brass: Lancashire if you simply want more of exactly this, harder. Food Chain Magnate if it was out-thinking the other players, and you have the group for it. Furnace if you are honest with yourself about how often the big box actually comes down off the shelf.

This article is part of our guide to the best heavy Euro board games, which ranks the weight class as a whole. If you want to go sideways rather than heavier, our best drafting board games pillar and our best deck-building board games list cover two other mechanisms worth owning, and British board games has more from the same corner of history as Brass. For the light end of the same instinct, try games like Cascadia or games like 7 Wonders.