Brass: Lancashire Score Calculator & Scoring Guide
Total your link points and flipped industry-tile points across the canal and rail eras — the arithmetic happens for you. Free, for 2 to 4 players.
Score Calculator
| Category | ||
|---|---|---|
| Link Points | ||
| Industry Tile Points | ||
| Total | 0 | 0 |
It's a tie at the top — check your rulebook's tiebreaker!
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: Lancashire across both eras so the link math never stalls the table.
How Brass: Lancashire Scoring Works
Martin Wallace's 2007 original 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 stripped for the transition — the canals come up and the oldest, level-1 industry tiles are cleared away — 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 lay between locations on the Lancashire map. 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 at every location it touches: the numbered icons printed beside the towns, plus any sitting on industry tiles already built at those spots. A link threaded between two busy, built-up towns can be worth a pile of points; a link out to an empty corner of the county 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. A tile flips when its job is done: coal mines and iron works flip when their last resource cube is taken, cotton mills flip when you sell their cotton, and ports flip once they have handled enough cotton — including cotton sold by an opponent, which is one of Lancashire's sharpest tensions. Shipyards are the big-ticket tiles, carrying the largest point values on the board. An unflipped tile scores nothing no matter how expensive it was to build, so getting tiles flipped is the whole game. Like links, flipped tiles are scored at the end of each era; sum both eras here.
Why Cotton Decides the Score
Lancashire's whole economy runs on cotton, and cotton only turns into points when it finds a buyer. A mill sells through a port sitting on your network — yours or, awkwardly, an opponent's, which flips their port and hands them the VP — or straight out to the distant market, where demand deteriorates as the game wears on. Liverpool on the coast is the natural outlet and Manchester the industrial heart, which is why the canals and rails between them are usually the most contested lines on the board. Coal and iron feed that machine: their markets set prices that rise as cubes are taken and fall as new mines and works pump supply back in, so timing a build against the market is often what makes a tile flip at all. And shipyards, the largest point tiles in the game, sit at the end of that chain as the payoff for a network that actually got built.
Lancashire vs. Birmingham
Brass: Birmingham is the 2018 sibling built on this design, and it keeps the scoring engine intact: links plus flipped industries, scored at the end of both eras. What changes is everything feeding it. Lancashire has no beer and no breweries — cotton reaches its buyers through ports and the distant market rather than a barrel of beer — and it has shipyards where Birmingham has potteries and manufactured goods. Same two rows on the score sheet, noticeably different roads to filling them in.
Looking for a Brass: Lancashire Score Sheet?
If you came here hunting for a Brass: Lancashire score sheet to print, the calculator above does the same job with the math built in — a row for every scoring category, a column per player, totals handled. It forgets everything when you leave, though. For a score sheet that remembers — every game, every player, every win — Brass: Lancashire is one of 300+ games in the free Meeply app.
This Page Adds. Meeply Remembers.
A calculator gives you tonight's total and forgets it. Meeply tracks Brass: Lancashire 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: Lancashire is one of 300+ games with rules-aware scoresheets built in.
