Brew - Review

ODBG 0011 - Review of Brew

What is Brew?

Brew is a light dice placement (worker placement) board game where you are trying to control the seasons and the release Brew Creatures back into the forests.

Good things about Brew

The worker placement aspect is done really well - you get different types of workers to use each round based on your dice roll AND the best thing is you can manipulate the dice. As a worker placement (dice placement) game it is area control against other players for different forests in different seasons.

The Artwork is quite nice and very functional - we didn't have too many problems understanding iconography of things that we can do on our turns.

The win conditions were clear and concise - whoever interacts with the seasons the most with their creatures, potions and forests get the most points and wins.

Not too intense - at roughly 2 minutes or less per turn (average) it's something you can put a bit of strategic thought into but not so much that a turn might last 40 minutes due to analysis paralysis (I do have 1 friend who did this in a different game ;)). It's a nice feeling that it's easy enough to plan your actions when it's not your turn.

Tableaux (ish) builder - being able to build a tableaux of trained creatures which activate regularly when placing dice and temporary potions which manipulate dice were done in a really clear way. AND the more you release creatures or drink potions the more points scored.

Quick Teach - This might be a bit specific to my game but my friend taught Brew to us in under 10 minutes easily and helped guide us through the game really well. So good that we didn't really ask too many questions throughout the game.

Bad things about Brew

Casual Board Gamers might struggle with it - Worker placement, especially with dice, is a difficult type of game for more casual board gamers (monopoly, cleudo etc) to get their heads round. At the same time, if I were to introduce them to an advanced worker placement game I would say this might be a great start if not to teach them more complex games but to gauge how well they cope with larger euro games.

I prefer more complex worker placement games - it's really smooth in the way it does things, however if you love Worker Placement games because of their complexity and other shenanigans you can do, there's other games out there that do it better.

The theme doesn't quite grab me - I found it difficult to understand entirely what it's about because why are we trying to have area control in different forests? “Bring back balance” so are the seasons out of control ? Is the only way to bring back balance by harvesting herbs from the forest to make potions and releasing creatures back into them? It just didn't quite do it for me.

Summary of Brew

A really well put together game where the mechanics are fantastic! Definitely worth playing if you want to start your journey into discovering more complex games. A really quick teach can make all the difference and Brew has it. If you're looking for a game that's one of the gateways in your board game journey Brew is one of the guards on the gate just after Catan.

Thank you for reading.

Sam

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