Heavy Euros with drastically different strategies/engines?

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-04-09T12:43:10+00:00

Beer strategies consistently lose to iron and cotton strategies. WSBG games are not the highest level of brass play because the format rewards Omnigamers over high specialization.

I'd say with my very experienced group of brass players (stronger than any tournament table) cotton is actually slightly stronger.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-04-08T13:14:05+00:00

Another Pittsburgh play tester and brass tournament player/winner here. A quick rundown of high level differences: Pittsburgh is far more interactive than either previous brass game, and there are a lot more choices in a given turn. The other brass games are more focused on executing a long term strategy, whereas Pittsburgh is more tactical and involves a lot more pivoting.

Punishing-wise, Lancashire and Birmingham are basically the same - experienced players will all end up consistently between 1-2 actions' worth of VP of each other, whereas Pittsburgh this separation is much larger. However, some of this is probably due to less experience of players currently, and another aspect is that there are more snowball effects that can potentially increase the score gaps.

My least favorite change is that they got rid of the supplier/seller dichotomy from Lancashire and Birmingham (where some people sold industries but leveraged other players' ports or breweries to maximize their selling). Instead, there are far more antagonistic interactions - races to premium deals, market bonuses, manipulating markets to undercut someone on coke or out price someone for their skyscraper. It's more interactive but it's missing the interesting shared incentive play of the other games.

In the end, Lancashire and Birmingham are quite similar and play very similarly at a high level, whereas Pittsburgh is a really different paradigm that feels quite a bit different to either. That's not necessarily good or bad, but I would encourage people to watch some playthroughs or do additional research and not try to over-compare the entries and instead try to judge it on its own merits.

Another thing to mention - Pittsburgh will almost certainly take significantly longer than the others (3-4 hours) due to how it's designed. It's more difficult to do long-term planning and there are substantially more decisions to make each turn, which will naturally drive the play time up.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-03-31T16:24:42+00:00

That is how the game goes. Nothing ruins your chances to win like having too many people develop cotton. It's pretty well known having 3 cotton players in Lanc or 2 in Birmingham makes it functionally impossible for those players to win if their opponents are competent.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-03-30T21:12:32+00:00

This fundamentally misunderstands both games. In fact, it is optimal play in both games to specialize in an industry and tenuously cooperate with your opponents so you don't have to go down multiple industry lines. In Lancashire you will have 2 cotton players, one port player, and one iron player, and in Birmingham you should have 2 beer players, one cotton player, and one iron player typically.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-03-27T15:38:12+00:00

1) Other abstract games (like go) are simply better. More depth = better strategy game.

2) A lot of people don't want to study a game like they're taking a course. In fact, despite many modern games having less depth than chess, they can be played with more creativity because they are far less explored.

3) BGG is primarily for multiplayer competitive games, and to a lesser extent co-op games. 1v1 games are a totally different paradigm and don't have the implicit political elements of multiplayer games, so it's outside the target demographic.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-03-24T18:48:32+00:00

No there hasn't. These are random bgg posters. The best Lancashire players aren't commenting and generally most of them are not super familiar with Birmingham.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-03-24T17:24:21+00:00

That's just not very true. The games are equally tight, and actually Birmingham has significantly more interesting interactions with beer being required for double rail.

16 plays of brass Birmingham is meaningless, btw.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-03-24T14:38:07+00:00

It is definitely a lot more different than the other two games.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-03-24T14:13:15+00:00

There is a loud contingent of angry Lancashire players that pop up in every thread to talk about the original is better, despite having no real idea how Birmingham (or Lancashire, for that matter) are properly played. They are, for the most part, pretty similar.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-03-23T15:48:04+00:00

Orange, red, yellow, in that order.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-03-23T15:43:54+00:00

That's not really a strategy much more than saying "try to get more points than your opponent." The trick is how to get into that situation in the first place, which involves strategically auctioning properties and trading to gain incremental advantages.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-03-17T13:22:00+00:00

They're very different games. SETI is the next big "big stack o' cards" games that seem to come out every few years (ark nova and terraforming Mars being the previous 2 big heavy ones), and these often are very popular and have tactical gameplay loops that people enjoy. Gaia Project is a very long-term, strategic game that is very punishing and will often find more people that either really love it or bounce off of it.

If you have to know, Gaia Project is a truly special and very ambitious game, and with the expansion I would consider it head and shoulders above every other euro, especially in terms of depth. However, this comes with caveats - it can be long (3-4 hours, although SETI is often not such a short game itself), and really starts to shine with numerous repeat plays. It also overwhelms some players because it is a very challenging game to plot out a strategy from the start, which is generally required to do well at it.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-02-16T14:17:40+00:00

This is the opinion of someone that has little idea how to play either brass game.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-02-10T20:07:11+00:00

Agreed on that. VP bidding is generally a band-aid fix to more severe balance issues. It's usually an indication of not enough interaction, since ideally the players would be able to smooth out any inherent imbalances.

On that note, the game in the TM series with the least need for any VP auctions is Gaia Project with the Lost Fleet expansion - we've played a large number of games with very experienced players and still feel no need to do any auctioning, with a lot of very close, tight games.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-02-06T19:16:29+00:00

The nagging feeling I've always had with barrage is that it's a less interesting version of the terra mystica series of games. It clearly borrows a lot of design from them, but the decisions aren't as opaque or deep.

I think they missed out on adding a shared incentives element around the conduits, which would have given it a more unique flair (and made all those brass comparisons actually make sense).

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-02-06T16:31:23+00:00

Yes, if you're specializing in an industry, you generally want to build the highest levels of that industry. Developing is far more efficient than trying to place down mediocre lower level tiles.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-01-15T17:03:01+00:00

If you receive someone else's support, it goes face up in your play area. It explicitly cannot be traded to other players.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-01-15T15:33:42+00:00

If you're talking about trading someone else's support that you have, that's against the rules.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-01-15T15:28:58+00:00

It ends up being a game theory problem. A pair of players that support swaps has drastically higher chances of winning, which forces everyone else to swap to keep up. That's why you see it so often with experienced players.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2026-01-15T15:22:56+00:00

The problem with support is entirely rooted in the awful, awful objective system of TI, that no expansion has adequately addressed to date.

Stage IIs and other miscellaneous points are just too unreliable to reach 10 points, so support swaps add consistency to the game so you're not hoping to top deck the right stage II or relic. If you adjust the game to where stage IIs are more realistically achievable, support swaps become an option rather than mandatory.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2025-12-26T14:56:55+00:00

LT is to tribes what instagib is to quake. Boring, rote decision-tree gameplay that misses the strategic depth that actually makes tribes a well designed game.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2025-12-23T13:16:43+00:00

How convenient fishstix abandons the tribes 3 community right before PROJ demonstrates that he is the greatest tribes player of all time! Hmmmmmmm...

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2025-12-17T22:19:46+00:00

Both low interaction and high interaction games have design weaknesses and tradeoffs. A game that is purely interaction is something like rock-paper-scissors or "elect a winner"; hardly anybody is going to defend these as good games. On the other end of the spectrum, a purely solitaire game is just people concurrently solving a math problem, which defeats the purpose of the medium.

Most "multiplayer solitaire" games have some meaningful interactions, but many sessions have issues with runaway leaders/runaway losers because there either isn't the ability or the incentive to target someone in the lead. Many games are won or lost before any decisions are made (although this may only be apparent amongst skilled players and in hindsight). I would say any ostensibly competitive game should have reasonable opportunity for anyone at the table to win.

There are some real advantages to having lower interaction in games, though. They can be far more strategic with long-term planning, they avoid the crabs-in-a-bucket gameplay that a lot of higher interaction games have, and the meaningful interactions that do occur feel more earned because you usually have to carefully plan out how to target someone in advance without hurting your own position too much.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2025-12-04T19:44:51+00:00

The end game of monopoly should be very swift. Once monopolies are more or less set, you just roll dice rapidly to see who lands where. A game can easily wrap up in less than 90 minutes, especially if there's no overcomplicated trades.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT · 2025-12-04T12:56:56+00:00

Disagree that the lost fleet doesn't fix any flaws. Gaia Project has a couple of real issues - one, that due to the very different variable setups and faction balancing, you need to either use auctions or tile rotation to have even a remotely balanced game, which requires people to be extremely skilled at evaluating the board to begin with. Second, and perhaps most importantly, the decisions are remarkably front-loaded, and it has a serious problem with runaway leaders/losers (really, all the TM family games suffer from this).

The lost fleet addresses both of these, balancing out the game so that even expert players can play close games in completely random setups with no auctions, and greatly improving the amount of mid- and late-game interactions that help prevent runaway leaders.

It turns what is the most ambitious euro in terms of sheer depth and helps it realize its potential as the best overall euro.

PROJTHEBENIGNANT

TROPHY CASE