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Selling printable Brass: Birmingham link-and-flip logs as downloads: the log your buyer trusts when a flip is argued over

A printable Brass: Birmingham log lives or dies on the one record nobody keeps: which tiles were flipped, which links were beside them, and what was left unflipped when the era ended, because only flipped industry tiles score. The game runs in two eras, the Canal Era from 1770 to 1830 and the Rail Era from 1830 to 1870, and each era ends with the same scoring: every link scores 1 victory point for each adjacent location showing the link-scoring icon, every flipped industry tile scores its printed victory points, and every unflipped tile scores nothing. After Canal scoring, level-1 industries are removed from the board, except pottery, so a tile that was never flipped in the Canal Era does not quietly carry its points into the Rail Era. Nobody at the table argues about whether scoring happened; they argue about whether that cotton mill was flipped before the era ended, and whether that rail link really touched two scoring locations.

The resources are where the argument starts, because coal and iron do not follow the same rule. Coal must come from a connected source: the closest connected unflipped coal mine owned by any player supplies it for free, and only if no connected mine exists do you buy from the coal market. Iron needs no connection at all: iron is taken from any unflipped Iron Works first, for free, and only then bought from the iron market. Beer works a third way: selling cotton, manufactured goods, or pottery flips the tile, but the sale must go to a merchant wanting that good and must consume beer, with your own brewery's beer needing no connection while an opponent's beer must connect to the location that needs it. So the same build can be free, market-priced, or impossible depending on whose mine, works, or brewery sits where, and the sheet has to record the source before it records anything else.

The worked scoring line is the part buyers actually check before they trust the sheet. Take a player at the end of the Rail Era with two rail links and three industry tiles on the board. The first link touches two locations showing the link-scoring icon, for 2 points; the second touches one, for 1 point; links total 3 points. Two tiles are flipped, with printed values of 4 and 3, for 7 points; the third tile is unflipped, so its printed value counts for 0. The player holds 23 pounds, worth 1 point per 10 pounds held, for 2 points. The line reads: links 3, flipped tiles 7, money 2, total 12 points, and every number on the line can be checked against the board, the flipped tiles, and the cash in hand.

The counterfactuals are what make the log worth printing rather than scribbling. If that third tile had been flipped before the era ended, with a printed value of 5, the total would be 17, not 12, which is exactly why the flip date matters more than the tile's presence. If the first link had touched only one scoring location instead of two, the total would be 11, not 12, which is why the link's neighbours matter as much as the link itself. And if the player had spent 10 pounds on a final double rail link, paying 15 pounds and 2 coal for two links in one action instead of holding the cash, the money points would fall by 1 while the new links could add back more, a trade the sheet has to show rather than hide. The game ends after Rail Era scoring, with ties broken first by income and then by money, so a miscounted link or an unflipped tile is not a footnote; it is the difference between winning and losing on the tie-break.

That is why the sheet sells as a download rather than as a blank victory point track. A blank track records how many points each player holds; a worked link-and-flip log records the decision the table actually argued about, with each link, its adjacent scoring locations, each tile, whether it flipped and when, the resource source that made the build possible, and the points it produced all on the same line, so the era total falls out of the sheet instead of out of a twenty-minute recount. Print it, fill one line per link and one line per tile per era, and the next time someone says that mill was flipped, the answer is on the paper, not in anyone's memory.

This is an unofficial fan-made log sheet, not affiliated with or endorsed by Roxley Games. Brass: Birmingham is a board game designed by Gavan Brown, Martin Wallace, and Matt Tolman.

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