Brass: Birmingham Score Calculator & Scoring Guide
Total your link points and flipped industry-tile points across both eras — the arithmetic happens for you. Free, for up to 4 players.
Score Calculator
| Category | ||
|---|---|---|
| Link Points | ||
| Industry Tile Points | ||
| Income Track Points | ||
| Total | 0 | 0 |
It's a tie — most money left wins!
This calculator totals your links and flipped industries and forgets when you leave. Era-by-era scoring, saved games, and player stats live in the free Meeply app →
Nice game! This page won't remember it.
Refresh and tonight's scores are gone. Meeply keeps every game, every player, every win rate — and tracks Brass: Birmingham across both eras so the link math never stalls the table.
Keep your games — get Meeply freeHow Brass: Birmingham Scoring Works
Brass doesn't drip points out during play — it scores in two big moments. The game runs in two eras: the Canal Era first, then the Rail Era. At the end of each era you score twice, once for your links and once for your flipped industry tiles, adding the points cumulatively to the same score track. Then the board is wiped for the transition — every canal link comes off, and every level-1 industry tile (flipped or not) is removed — before the Rail Era builds on top. Money and income never convert to points. Here's each piece.
1Link Points
Links are the canals and railways you build between locations. They score independently at the end of each era — canal links during Canal Era scoring, rail links during Rail Era scoring. Each individual link is worth victory points equal to the sum of the link VP icons shown at every location it touches: the numbered icons printed beside towns and merchants, plus any sitting on the industry tiles built at those spots. A link wedged between two busy, developed locations can be worth a pile of points; a link out to an empty corner scores almost nothing. Enter every link point you banked across both eras here — the app tracks it per era, but the combined total is what decides the game.
2Industry Tile Points
Every industry tile has a victory-point number printed on it, but you only score it once the tile is flipped face-up — 'developed'. A tile flips when its job is done: coal mines and iron works flip when the last resource cube is taken from them, breweries flip when their last beer barrel is consumed, and cotton mills, potteries, and manufactured-goods factories flip when you sell their product. An unflipped tile scores nothing no matter how expensive it was to build — getting tiles flipped is the whole game. Like links, flipped tiles are scored at the end of each era; sum both eras here.
3Income Track Points
Here's the honest answer: in official Brass: Birmingham, money and your position on the income track do NOT score victory points. Only link points and flipped-industry points count. Income matters because you collect it every round to fund your next moves, and slipping into negative income can hurt you during play — but it never becomes VP at the end. Leave this row at 0 for a rules-accurate game. It exists only for tables running a house variant that converts leftover income into points; if that's you, enter your converted value. Otherwise, remember that money is the tiebreaker, not a scoring category.
Brass: Lancashire — The Original
Brass: Lancashire is the game Birmingham was rebuilt from, and it scores on the same two-era, links-plus-flipped-industries backbone — but the economy around it differs. Lancashire is all about cotton: instead of Birmingham's beer-fueled network of breweries, potteries, and manufactured goods, you're spinning cotton and racing it out through ports to distant external markets, where selling into those far markets is a major source of points and flips. The link and industry scoring will feel familiar, but the paths to flipping your tiles — and the tempo of the two eras — play quite differently.
This Page Adds. Meeply Remembers.
A calculator gives you tonight's total and forgets it. Meeply tracks Brass: Birmingham era by era — links, flipped industries, the running score track — and keeps every game, every player, every "I always win at Brass" debate settled with receipts.
Free to try. Brass: Birmingham is one of 300+ games with rules-aware scoresheets built in.
