Fulfil your wildest hops and dreams
BEER & BREAD
Designer: Scott Almes | Publisher: Pegasus Spiele
In Beer and Bread, you and another player control neighbouring villages with a friendly rivalry. Both sides have long competed to prove who has the best bakers and brewers. In an effort to settle the matter, you embark upon a gruelling six-year long contest to decide who is truly the champion of these traditional bucolic arts. The losing village will be razed to the ground, its inhabitants banished, its name erased from the history books.
That last sentence isn’t true – unless you house-rule it – but it’s certainly the case that a great deal of pride is at stake in this two-player game of hand management and resource control. The game is split into six rounds or ‘years’, three of which will have bumper harvests, and three of which will have smaller yields. In each of those years, you’ll be dealt a hand of cards, each of which allow you to do multiple things, depending on which bit of the card you choose to activate.
You can play a card for its harvest section, in which case you grab some resources from the fields or the river – wheat, barley, rye, hops or water, each charmingly rendered in coloured wooden tokens – and place them in your storehouse. If you’ve already harvested that year, you get the resources on the card you play plus all the ones you’ve already harvested, again. Which means that harvesting loads reaps ever-bigger rewards… except you’ve got limited storage space and the fields – which you share with your neighbour – don’t have infinite supplies.
In fact, if you harvest resources you can’t store, you have to offer them to your opponent. So maybe you need to produce some bread and/or beer? That is, after all, what this contest is about. The middle of each card shows a recipe for the aforementioned carbladen comestible or heady beverage – all you need do is place the card in your brewery or bakery along with the required resources and your team will get to work.
But wait! What if your brewers are already up to their armpits in intoxicating hoppy suds? Maybe you need to expand your facilities – or at least clean them so you can start work on a new recipe. The lowest section of each card features an upgrade you can slot into the bottom of your player board to give you on ongoing bonus, special ability, or additional points at the game’s end. At the same time, you remove completed beer and bread recipes from your brewery and bakery, freeing up space.
The final, delicious twist in the artisanal pretzel is that, in fruitful years, you don’t get to keep your hand; rather, you play a card, then pass the rest to your opponent, who passes you theirs, then the process repeats. In dry years, you can swap cards in your hand with those in a small tableau. This makes each choice a fiendish trilemma – should you harvest these resources now, knowing your opponent might take the card that will let you turn those resources into beer, upgrade your facilities to make later moves more efficient, or maybe take the recipe you suspect they might be building towards? Cards harvested in fruitful years return to your hand, allowing a nice rhythm of resource gathering and planning when crops are bumper, then brewing and baking when things are lean.
Designer Scott Almes has been steadily establishing a reputation that manages to link the normallydistant qualities of reliable and ingenious, with fun, solid titles like So, You’ve Been Eaten, the Tiny Epic series, and criminally-overlooked skeleton-dynamiting escapade The Great Dinosaur Rush. Beer and Bread continues this tradition. It’s fun, squeezy and thinky, fairly easy to pick up and relaxed without being shallow.
If I had to reach for gripes, the game feels like it’s been balanced to within an inch of its life – the five resources more or less function identically, recipes all score within a tight band of points, upgrades offer mostly marginal benefits – so, for all your choices, it’s actually very forgiving. But overall, this is a very enjoyable light-to-midweight title that will make you the ‘toast’ – a pun that works for both beer and bread – of any gaming night.
TIM CLARE
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗60 x cards
◗ Board
◗84 resource tokens
◗Year marker
◗ Scoring pad
◗ Windmill
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED AGRICOLA: ALL CREATURE BIG & SMALL…
Uwe Rosenberg fans – of which I am one – will find much to enjoy in Beer and Bread, especially if they like his work on the Agricola: All Creatures Big & Small and Hallertau end of things.