A printable Brass: Birmingham score sheet is judged twice, and that is the whole problem. This is a game that stops in the middle, counts everything, tears half of it off the board, and then does it all again — and the sheet most sellers ship has one scoring block, as if the game had one ending. It does not. At the end of the Canal Era the table scores every link and every flipped industry, removes the links, removes every level-one industry, refills the merchant beer, shuffles the discards into a new deck, and plays the entire Rail Era on the bones of the first score. Then it scores again, and the winner is the sum of two audits conducted two hours apart, the first of which was performed on tiles that no longer exist. That is why the argument in this game is never really "how many points was that link worth." It is "that link touched two locations with icons — or was it three," asked after the link tiles have been swept into the box. Or "my brewery flipped in the Canal Era and scored — does it score again now," asked about a tile that has been sitting face-up so long nobody remembers which era it flipped in. Or "I flipped his iron works on my turn, so whose income went up." Every disputed Birmingham finish is the same dispute in different clothes: a score that was settled in two instalments, recorded in one block, by people who threw away the evidence between instalments. That is the seller this vertical rewards. Not the seller with the prettiest canal artwork, because the board comes in the box and your buyer already owns it. The seller whose sheet keeps the two era scores in two sealed blocks that never overwrite each other, records every link's icon count before the links are removed, tracks each flipped industry by the era it flipped in, and gives the tie-break — income first, then money — its own box instead of leaving it to whoever still has cash visible. Nobody refunds a score sheet because a game was long. They stop reordering when a winner was argued over at the end of the Rail Era and the sheet held one blended total and no Canal Era evidence. This guide walks through what a serious printable set actually contains, the rules every buyer assumes your sheet enforces, a worked game with the arithmetic checked the hard way, what the main channels really take from a low-priced set, the delivery failures specific to a game that scores twice and destroys its own evidence in between, and the setup that prevents each one — including the honest cases where you should stay exactly where you are.
What a printable Brass: Birmingham set actually contains (and why the two era blocks never touch)
A serious set contains five things, and the first is the one most sellers skip because it looks like duplication: two complete era-scoring blocks, Canal and Rail, each with the same two sub-blocks in the game's own order — links first, then flipped industries — and a running total line that adds the Canal block once, seals it, and never lets a Rail Era pencil back into it. The Canal block is evidence about tiles that are about to be destroyed, so it must be completable, in full, before a single tile is lifted. Second, a per-link ledger: one row per link tile, naming the two locations it connects, the number of scoring icons showing in each adjacent location, and the sum — because a link's value is not printed on the link, it is printed on its neighbours, and the moment the links are removed the neighbours are all that remains. A total-only link row cannot be re-walked; a row that says "2 + 1 + 0 = 3" can be re-walked from the board in thirty seconds, before the sweep. Third, a flipped-industry ledger organised by era flipped: each industry tile, its type and level, the era in which it flipped, its printed victory points, and the income steps it granted when it flipped — with a carried-forward column marking which flipped tiles survive into the Rail Era and will score the same printed points a second time. This ledger is the difference between a sheet that knows the game's central trick and one that discovers it mid-argument. Fourth, an income and loans tracker: income level after each flip, each loan recorded as thirty pounds received and three income steps back, and a negative-income warning row, because in this game a player can owe the bank at round end and the shortfall rules — liquidate industries at half cost, then lose a victory point per pound still short — are the rules nobody believes until they are read aloud. Fifth, a Canal-to-Rail transition checklist printed between the two era blocks: links scored and removed, level-one industries removed, surviving flipped tiles marked, one beer barrel placed on each empty beer space beside a non-blank merchant, discards shuffled together into the new deck, eight cards dealt. The transition is where games silently corrupt — a level-one tile left on the board scores Rail Era points it was never entitled to — and a checklist is cheaper than an argument. Around those five, the supporting pages are the ones this game actually generates demand for: a network planner for each era, because canal and rail links obey different costs and the rail network is planned against coal and beer that may not exist yet; a merchant record, noting which merchant bonuses were taken and which beer spaces stand empty at the transition; and a turn-order spending log, because next round's order is set by who spent least, and the money sitting on character tiles is a record the table keeps throwing back into the bank unrecorded. Print both era blocks on the sheet itself, in full, every time. A combined "game total" box with two eras pencilled into its margins is not a scoring system; it is a rumour with a frame around it.
The rules every buyer assumes (and the checks that enforce them)
Your buyer assumes the sheet knows the game scores twice, so start there. Each era ends when the players' final cards are used, and each era ends with the same two steps in the same order. First, links: each of your link tiles scores one victory point for each scoring icon showing on a location adjacent to that link — count icons, not locations, because a location can show more than one — and then every link tile is removed from the board. Second, industries: each of your flipped industry tiles scores the victory points printed on it, and unflipped tiles score nothing at all. Hold those two steps apart on the sheet, because the commonest scoring leak in this game is a table that scores its flipped industries, feels finished, and sweeps its links into the box unscored. Then the flipping rules, which are two rules wearing one name. Cotton mills, manufacturers, and potteries flip when their owner takes a Sell action and sells to a suitable merchant. Coal mines, iron works, and breweries flip when the last resource on the tile is removed — the final coal cube, the final iron cube, the last beer barrel consumed — and that removal can happen on another player's turn, when an opponent takes your last iron cube or drinks your last barrel. The income increase printed on the tile is granted immediately, to the tile's owner, whoever's turn it is; the victory points are granted at era scoring, and only at era scoring. A sheet that pays the points at flip time double-pays them at era end, and a sheet that pays the income to the player who caused the flip has robbed the quietest points in the game. Then the rule the whole sheet is built around: a flipped tile that stays on the board scores again at the end of the next era. Flip a level-two brewery in the Canal Era and it scores its printed points at Canal scoring, stays, and scores the same points again at Rail scoring. The exceptions are the level-one tiles: after Canal scoring, every level-one industry is removed from the board whether it scored or not, so a level-one tile gets exactly one chance to score and a level-two tile gets two — and the ledger must say which is which before the removal, not reconstruct it after. Then income, loans, and the round end. Income is collected at the end of the round — except after the final round of the Rail Era, when it is not collected at all. A negative income level means paying the bank instead; a player who cannot pay liquidates industry tiles from the board at half their cost, rounded down, until the debt is covered, and loses one victory point for each pound still short after that. A loan is thirty pounds from the bank and the income marker moves back three steps, immediately, and loans are never repaid — the income loss is the repayment, which is why the tracker records the steps, not a balance. Turn order for the next round goes to the player who spent the least money this round, ties keeping their relative order, and the money spent sits visibly on character tiles until the round ends — the sheet's spending log simply writes down what the table is already displaying. The tie-break, printed where the totals are: most victory points wins; tied players compare income level, highest first; then most money remaining; players still tied share the win. Note what is not in the tie-break — links, industries, tiles on the board count for nothing once the totals are level — because at least one popular summary invents a board-based tie-break, and a sheet that copies it crowns the wrong winner with total confidence. One audit line matters too: a victory-point marker that passes one hundred loops the track and goes around again, so the sheet records each player's hundred-crossing, because a marker that lapped without being noted is how a hundred points quietly vanish from a close game. None of this is trivia. Each line is a place where a real table, playing from memory at the end of a two-hour industrial epic, produces a different winner than the rules do, and the sheet is the only player who never gets tired.
A worked game, and the arithmetic, checked the hard way
Four players finish the Rail Era. The sheet now walks each player in the game's own order — Canal links, Canal flipped industries, Rail links, Rail flipped industries — and seals each era before opening the next. Start with one link checked in full, because it is the row type the whole ledger exists for: a rail link of Ana's sits between two locations showing two scoring icons and one scoring icon, with a third adjacent location showing none, so that link scores 2 plus 1 plus 0, which is 3 — icons, not locations. Ana's Canal Era: links 14, flipped industries 22, for a Canal subtotal of 14 plus 22, which is 36, sealed before the level-one tiles come off. Her Rail Era: links 18, flipped industries 41 — and the ledger shows that 9 of those 41 are three surviving tiles that already scored those same points at Canal scoring and have now legally scored them a second time — for a Rail subtotal of 18 plus 41, which is 59, and a total of 36 plus 59, which is 95. Ben is the cautionary tale this sheet exists to tell honestly: the strongest Rail Era at the table. His Canal Era: links 11, flipped industries 18, subtotal 29. His Rail Era: links 21 — the best rail network score in the game — flipped industries 44, the best industry score in the game, subtotal 65, six points better than Ana's Rail Era. His total is 29 plus 65, which is 94. The best second era in the game finishes second, by one point, because the Canal Era counts exactly as much as the Rail Era and Ben's canal network was thin — and you can only see that from a sheet that sealed the Canal block instead of blending it. Cleo: Canal links 17, the best canal network at the table, flipped industries 15, subtotal 32; Rail links 19, flipped industries 33, subtotal 52; total 84 — a network player through and through, top link score in both eras' canal half, never converting enough industries to flipped before either scoring. Dan: Canal links 9, flipped industries 12, subtotal 21; Rail links 13, flipped industries 28, subtotal 41; total 62, with the ledger showing two level-one tiles still unflipped when the Canal Era ended — removed unscored, exactly as the transition checklist recorded, which is why nobody at the table argues they should have scored in the Rail Era. Check the whole game the hard way: every link scored per adjacent icon and was then removed, so no link scored in both eras; every flipped tile scored its printed points once per era it survived, level-one tiles exactly once, unflipped tiles never; no points were paid at flip time, only income steps; and the winner was decided not by the era everyone remembers — Ben won that by six — but by a Canal subtotal recorded two hours earlier on tiles that no longer exist. That is a normal Birmingham finish, and it is unexplainable from four bare totals. From the sheet's two sealed blocks, it re-walks itself.
What the channels actually take from a low-priced set
The arithmetic of selling this set is the same arithmetic the worked game teaches: the number scored first is never the final number. On Etsy, a low-priced printable pays the listing fee, the transaction percentage, and the payment-processing percentage on every sale, and the regulatory and offsite-ads charges can apply on top depending on the shop and the buyer's route in — so a set priced on a whim at the lowest point in the search results can clear barely half its sticker after fees, before you count the time spent answering "does a flipped tile really score in both eras" messages that a missing carried-forward column guarantees. On a marketplace that takes a flat ten percent plus a per-sale amount, the per-sale amount punishes cheap products hardest, exactly as it does in every fee table in this series: the smaller the price, the larger the share the flat component eats. Selling from your own storefront inverts the problem — the platform percentage drops or disappears, but delivery, download limits, file updates when a new printing changes the board, and the buyer who cannot find the email at midnight all become your job, which is the honest trade this whole category is built on. Price the set for the table it serves: Brass: Birmingham buyers have already paid premium money for one of the highest-rated heavy games ever printed and will play it for a decade; a score set priced like a party-game afterthought signals that the second era block is probably missing, and in this vertical a missing era block is the one unforgivable defect. The bundle is the natural unit — both-era sheets, the per-link ledger, the flipped-industry and income trackers, and the transition checklist — because the buyer who needs one page needs all of them across a year of games, and a bundle raises the order value above the level where per-sale flat fees do their worst damage on every channel. What does not work is competing on page count. A forty-page set with one blended scoring block loses, in reviews, to an eight-page set that seals the Canal Era, records every link's icons before the sweep, and carries flipped tiles forward by name. Buyers say so, in those words, in the reviews that sell the next copy.
The three delivery failures specific to a game that scores twice and destroys its evidence in between
First failure: the buyer prints the set, plays once, and the sheet has one scoring block, so the table does the natural thing — scores the Canal Era, and when space runs out at Rail scoring, erases it, squeezes it into a margin, or starts a second sheet that gets separated from the first. This is the blended-total failure, and it is fatal because it does not look like a delivery problem; it looks like your product cannot count, and the review says "we lost the canal scores," which is the one sentence no reply can undo. In this game the first score is not a draft of the second — it is half the final result, recorded on tiles that are removed minutes later and can never be re-audited. The fix is at the file level: two complete, sealed era blocks on the sheet itself, sized so neither can borrow the other's space, with the transition checklist physically between them, so the act of turning from one block to the other is the act of performing the transition. Second failure: the download arrives as a single combined file and the buyer's printer, phone, or print shop mangles the one page they need; heavy-game buyers print at home, at work, and at copy shops, on two paper systems, and a per-link ledger whose icon-count columns were sized for one of them will clip on the other — and in this game the clipped column is not decoration, it is the only record of what a removed link was worth. Ship separated files as well as the combined one, size the columns for the narrower paper, and keep each era's link ledger and industry block together on their own pages, never split across a page break — a link ledger separated from its era subtotal by a page turn will be totalled from memory by someone, somewhere, in a way that costs them a game. Third failure: the file is updated — a corrected tie-break order, a clarified note that level-one potteries are removed with everything else — and past buyers never receive it, so two versions circulate and a club table scores the same finish two ways from two printouts of your product. Version every file in its footer, date it, and deliver through a system that re-serves the current version to past buyers instead of freezing the file at purchase; a score sheet is a rules document, and rules documents are judged on whether everyone at the table is holding the same one. All three failures share a shape: the file arrived, the payment cleared, and the product still failed, because in this category delivery is not the download — delivery is four people, two eras later, holding identical, unclipped paper that still remembers the Canal Era.
Editions and occasions are different products
The neighbouring game is the first segmentation trap in this vertical: Brass: Lancashire shares a designer, a name, half a vocabulary, and almost none of this scoring sheet's numbers — different map, different industry behaviour, no merchant beer refill of this kind — so a set labelled simply "Brass" will be bought by both tables and be wrong at one of them; the game name belongs in full on every sheet, not as branding but as a rules statement. Revised printings and the deluxe components change nothing about the scoring, and a sheet should say so on its first page, because buyers ask — the icons, the eras, and the tie-break are the product, and they are stable across the boxes your buyers own. Club and tournament play is a second occasion with its own layout: the per-link ledger promoted from a supporting page to the primary record, room for the hundred-point loop state of each marker, and space for an audited income-then-money tie-break, because organised play is where ties actually happen in a game this tight and where a sheet that cannot record one is quietly replaced. Two-player play is a third product, not a footnote: the map tightens, merchants are omitted, and a low-player-count set that records which merchants and cards were removed at setup — rather than trusting the table to remember at the transition refill — solves the one setup argument two-player tables actually have. Even before promos, the honest segmentation is by scoring situation: games decided in the Canal block, games decided in the Rail block, games decided on income after a level total. A sheet range that names the situation it covers sells to the player who has lived it. What does not segment is colour. The same correct sheet in five palettes is one product wearing five thumbnails, buyers can tell, and in a vertical where trust is the entire offer, they price that tell correctly.
The setup that prevents all three (and when to stay put)
The setup is boring, which is how you know it is the setup. Keep one master file per game — Birmingham and Lancashire never sharing one — versioned and dated in the footer, and generate every channel's copy from it so no marketplace listing can drift an era block behind another. Deliver separated files alongside the combined one, sized for both paper systems, with each era's scoring block and link ledger intact on their own pages. Deliver through a system that gives the buyer a lasting, re-downloadable copy of the current version rather than a link that expires into a support message — this is the unglamorous job FileFreight exists to do for digital-download sellers, flat-rate delivery with proper download handling, though be honest about its edges: it does not handle your taxes or act as merchant of record, it is not a Shopify app, and there is no importer yet, so a seller whose problem is tax handling should solve that problem instead. Test the actual buyer path before you scale the listing: buy your own set on a phone, on hotel Wi-Fi, print it on the other paper system, and score the worked game above from the printout alone — if both era blocks, the transition, and the tie-break cannot be performed from the paper without the rulebook, the product is not finished, whatever the file says. And the staying-put cases, stated plainly. If your current pad already seals the Canal Era separately, records every link's icon count before removal, and carries surviving flipped tiles forward by name, you do not need this set and neither do your buyers — say so in your own listing if it is true of a rival, because tables remember who told them. If you play only the introductory one-era game, a single-era pad serves you better and costs less. If your group house-rules away the canal cleanup and plays one continuous game, be honest that no sheet in this vertical is built for that game. The sellers who last in this vertical are the ones whose sheets survive an audit after a two-era game, whose link rows can be re-walked before the sweep, and whose buyers discover — the first time the best Rail Era in the room loses by one point — that the paper in front of them already knew. That is the whole product. Everything else is artwork.
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