01-24-2025
One of the most impressive board games of the past 10 years is Brass: Birmingham. In Brass, players immerse themselves in the English Industrial Revolution and experience capitalism in a low-stakes setting. They build industries, canals, and railroads, and try to sell their products in a race to control the most capital. It is a complex game, but I find that it showcases important facets of capitalism.
In my Cornerstone classes, I guide students through classic readings in political economy: Marx’s Capital, Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Schumpeter’s Can Capitalism Survive?, etc. After reading these, students directly experienced and applied the newly learned concepts as they played Brass in a classroom setting.
Brass is a game about capital. You use cardboard money to build industries on the game’s map and sell the commodities that you subsequently produce. That’s three kinds of capital (money, commodities, and productive processes), but capital requires circulation. Brass forces players to not only build the industries that produce commodities, but also to build those systems of circulation to get those commodities sold. One of Brass’s most celebrated mechanics is that players need to build connections via either canals or railroads to sell successfully and get access to important raw materials. Players not only engage in production, they also build the market that makes their production successful.
One of the more interesting facets of capitalism is what Joseph Schumpeter calls "creative destruction" -- the process by which capitalism destroys and replaces the structures within which it functions. Brass brilliantly displays this process by taking place across two distinct eras: the canal era and the railroad era.
Players begin in the former era, building canals and lower-level industries in limited spaces. At the end of this era, players transition to the next stage in dramatic fashion. All canals and lower-level industries are removed from the game. Thematically, this is because they cannot keep up with the new innovations.
In the railroad era, players begin anew, but they can connect via railroads and have more opportunities for where to build industries. The old world is destroyed, and a new one emerges though the enhanced capacities of industrial capitalism. Players, too, get to watch this process firsthand and get to appreciate the dynamism latent in such a system.
The competitive nature of the game provides insights into capitalist competition. Players race to control the most capital, mirroring the competitive drive in capitalist economies. Strategic decision-making in resource allocation and investment reflects the challenges faced by capitalist entrepreneurs. Through engaging with these mechanics, players can gain a deeper understanding of the strategic considerations and competitive pressures inherent in capitalist systems.
By simulating aspects of capital accumulation, market creation, technological change, and creative destruction, Brass: Birmingham provides valuable insights into the complex dynamics of capitalism.
Troy Seagraves is a visiting instructor in Purdue’s Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program. Specializing in normative ethics, he received his PhD in Philosophy from Purdue in 2024. In teaching, Seagraves incorporates games into his lessons. Games allow players to immerse themselves into different perspectives and adopt new motivational structures. When coupled with course readings, games bring a student in direct contact with the phenomenon the readings pertain to. Currently, Seagraves teaches SCLA 102 for business majors where his students engage readings in political economy alongside a board game.