Brew Crafters

Neveststar6,2

This game borrows very heavily from Agricola. Mechanically, I think the game is pretty good. Thematically, it falls apart rather spectacularly. I’m a casual fan of craft beer and just knowing the basics of brewing, this game does a bunch of little things that pull me out of the theme. For starters, a brewpub can make the same beer as a brewery in half the time. Same ingredients, same points, just faster. I’m guessing this signifies selling directly to consumers instead of distributors, but it’s a huge difference in the game and seems like a minor difference for makers of beer. Next up is the fact that every beer you make, no matter the style or ingredients, takes the same amount of time to brew and sells for the exact same amount of money. Each beer earns different victory points in a rough correlation to the ingredients needed. Having different beers take different amounts of time to brew would have been a great addition to the game, but I can understand abstracting that out. It feels very wrong to sell every beer at the same price though, whether it be a pilsner or a barrel-aged stout. I’ll play this if my friend who owns it wants to, but I’d much rather play Agricola or Caverna.

EvEvanstar2,5

Brewcrafters is a game where each turn you go through two worker placement phases. In the first phase you collect resource cubes, and in the second phase your workers allow you to upgrade one of your boards or convert your cubes into dollars and points. At the end of every four turns, you have to pay dollars equal to the stuff you've unlocked. The first round of the game feels very slow, as it takes three production actions to unlock the extra worker to do a second produce/upgrade. In this game you don't really build a production engine. Your production ability is heavily at the mercy of what's left on the board when your turn comes around. What engine building exists is all about small increases in what you get with your gather actions, increasing the point values of what you produce or allowing you to produce more than one thing per turn if you managed to get enough cubes from the board. I found that the game actually presented me with very few hard decisions. Many actions are more opportunism on a large resource pile, and less strategy. One thing missing here is the tension you get in other, similar games where when you get a resource, you have to decide to spend that resource now, or save it and invest it to get a larger return later. This is totally absent as all the resources are spent for brewing, which in turn produces nothing other than a point token. The game also has very powerful cards that are first come first get, that increase your ability to access different cubes. These are very important, and to not manage to get one due to turn order can be frustrating. Turn order is awkward to change, because the starting player spot is shared with one of these important card acquisition spots, so it's often occupied early, and often the card is taken which means starting player remains the same. Resources are so tight in this game that one wrong move and you don't get to make anything that turn. Opponents will block your plans consistently. There are minor component design issues. The components look very dull, and on some components they use symbols and colors and on others they refer to components by name, which mixes me up. This game goes very near to things that I've liked in other games, but it just falls far short of being enjoyable.

Decanostar8,5

Cada vez que lo juego me gusta más. Un juego que trasmite similares sensaciones al Agrícola, pero con un tema que me atrae mucho más. Juego muy temático al que sólo le pongo un “pero: el final es un poco “coitus interruptus”. Cuando tu factoría empieza a rendir a lo grande... el juego acaba. Yo quizás le hubiese añadido un año más. Pero vamos... una pasada de juego!