Pegasus Spiele 57809E Beer & Bread (English Edition) (Deep Print Games) Board

Product Information

Deep Print Games has put together a soon-to-be-released board game that speaks to me greatly. Who wouldn't want to dive into a game all about Beer & Bread? This is a two-player strategic rivalry between two villages. During the fruitful season, resources are bountiful. Players take turns drafting and immediately playing their multi-use cards. The rest of hands will get circulated to the opponent after each turn. The chosen action dictates where we need to place the cards post-action. For instance, the cards will settle in our playing area. And when Beer & Bread are produced and upgrades are installed, they will end up in our barn. While the fruitful season drifts and after the inevitable change elapses, the utilization of these cards in this season will be pivotal. Because…

Why this sudden need to focus on ferments? Well, this modest box promised a lot of special-sauce game play for us; 2 player, multi-use cards, strategic drafting, forward planning, munchy-crunchy decision making, tension, sneaky-scoring, and clever resource management. And friends, I can confirm that the promises were kept! Each player represents one of these villages. Over the course of six years - which alternate between fruitful and dry - you must harmonize your duties of harvesting and storing resources, making beer and bread, selling them for coins and upgrading your facilities.Each of you represents one of these villages. Over the course of six years - which alternate between fruitful and dry - you must harmonize your duties of harvesting and storing resources, producing beer and bread, selling them for coins and upgrading your facilities. Founded on the fruitful lands of an erstwhile monastery, two villages have held up the dual tradition of baking bread and brewing beer. While sharing fields and resources, they still find pride in their friendly rivalry of outdoing each other’s produce.

Beer & Bread is a two-player game featuring multi-use cards and a unique round structure. The objective is to craft beer and bread using collected resources, but the amount you can craft is restricted to only one good per type. This is further complicated by the nature of final scoring: both good types are scored separately, and you retain the lowest of the two. During the dry years, three cards are added to the exchange area for players to swap and play. The game takes place over 6 years (rounds), and each year is either fruitful or dry. The year marker begins on a green spot representing the first year which is fruitful and move along until you reach the money spot. Then it’s pans and barrels down ready for scoring time. The game features alternating rounds of play offering up a twist on player interaction and the likes of card drafting and resource management. Each card is also multi-use so you'll have to tinker with the best use for them from turn to turn. Re-playability comes from the efficiency puzzle of how best to collect and spend resources whilst keeping your beer and bread scores as close as possible. However, you see a vast majority of the cards by the end of the game so there won’t be many surprises on future play throughs. This does not stop you from wanting to play again and again. Overall I really like Beer & Bread and look forward to teaching it to as many people as possible. The turn structures are fun and the limited space for resources make you think as efficiently as possible whilst trying to plan for future turns. I would have liked a solo mode but I can understand it might have been too fiddly to implement.The title and setting of the newest offering from designer Scott Almes and publisher Capstone Games sets the tone and has us asking all kinds of questions. Why are the two villages so close together? Will they combine into one mega-corporation to take over the world of brew and loaf? And are we selling our crafted creations to each other across the river? Are there outsiders who visit the local monastery, and do they come for our goods? Is this game creating an emergent narrative out of a simple two-player structure? Harvests that card for the resources shown on the top of the card – these go into the 9 box store show on the main board, and the card is placed to one side. Importantly the card is kept because resources will multiply if you lay another card on top which shows an identical resource (note: the resource has to show on the newest card to benefit from the multiplier effect of any existing resources; So, in Beer & Bread, each player plays a neighbouring village that loves to brew beer and, yep, bake bread. Not exactly vying for space as the no.1 superstore of old, there is nevertheless some competition brewing. The villagers are willing to share the raw materials, but what they do with them is where bucolic pride bubbles over! Set Up And very, very interestingly; remember I mentioned multi-use cards right at the start? Well, beer and bread cards also serve as upgrades! So you can instead use them to give yourself continuous benefits that pay out over the course of the game as well as some end game coin boosts. Plus that triggers a clean-up phase where your completed (sold) beer and bread cards get swept off the board and placed next to you for end game scoring. I really like that twist in the tiger loaf!

And I love how the type of year changes the game play – subtly on paper but significantly on the table. Even the upgrade powers change depending on whether you are rolling in rye or begging for barley. Scott ventures into the exciting (and pretty much underestimated) two-player terrain. I must admit that the allure of Beer and Bread lies in the thematic indulgence of the long tradition of alcohol refreshment and freshly baked bread. Yet, the perfectly tailored duel format is undeniably the ultimate catalyst that drove me to acquire this gem to my collection. Before we get into round structure, let’s discuss the multi-use card actions. Cards can be used in one of three ways during a turn: Harvest and Store, Produce and Sell, and Upgrade and Clean. Harvesting provides resources, producing allows players to craft goods with gained resources, and upgrading provides powerful abilities and clears out the goods that have been produced (remember, you can only store one of each type at a time). The harvest and store action provides resources from the card played, as well as any matching resources from a previous harvest. Multiuse cards? A Scott Almes’ design? 2 Player only game? Where do I sign?? Beer & Bread is filling me up like a triple layered chocolate cake!

The components included in Beer & Bread are excellent from the beautifully illustrated game board and cards to the cute resources and first player token. The artwork feels like it has been taken from a game that came out a few years ago. This is not a complaint as I really like the artwork by Michael Menzel, but just an observation that this looks like a Uwe Rosenburg classic. In Beer & Bread , two people compete against each other in a friendly rivalry. As the heads of a small village, they compete over six years to produce the most delicious beer and bake the best bread. Players share the fields and resources, but their own actions determine victory and defeat. Only those who create a balance of beer and bread will be victorious, because only the less lucrative resource is scored.