Brass: Birmingham
Industrial Revolution entrepreneurs: industry, network and credit in Birmingham, 1770–1870
Martin Wallace’s masterpiece of industrial economics (with Gavan Brown and Matt Tolman, 2018), a reimplementation of Brass: Lancashire. Each player is an entrepreneur competing in Birmingham during the Industrial Revolution (1770–1870), building industries — cotton mills, coal mines, iron works, manufacturers, breweries and potteries — and connecting them by canal and, later, rail.
The heart of the game is a real supply chain: selling goods consumes coal, iron and beer from shared markets with dynamic prices (the price rises as they run out), and you can only reach the markets your transport network connects to. In addition, credit lets you take out loans in exchange for lower income: leverage and the cost of debt in their purest form. Virtually no luck once the cards are dealt: everything is planning, timing and network economics.
Classroom value
- Playable industrial economics: integrates production, raw-material markets with endogenous prices and a transport network into one interdependent system.
- Credit and leverage: loans illustrate the cost of debt and cash management under time pressure.
- Network economics and externalities: each industry's value depends on its connections; good for systems thinking and path dependence.
- A natural bridge between economic history (Industrial Revolution) and the microeconomics of interconnected markets.