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. Each year has the same phases. But what you do in those phases can depend on whether it is a fruitful or dry year. 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… Throughout the game of Beer & Bread, you will be selling your resources to make the best beer and bread. But you cannot let one be better than the other as your final score is your lowest scoring beer or bread total. So, if your total score for bread was twenty three and your total score for beer was twenty eight, your final score would be twenty three. Quite a few other games (especially from Reiner Knizia) have used this mechanism to great effect and it is one I like as it makes you balance your efficiencies for all of your scoring opportunities. Look At The Rise On That 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.

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. Taking place over 6 years (rounds), the game gives and takes away. Fruitful years pay out resources aplenty on odd-numbered rounds. Wheat to waste?! Well, not exactly, as your opponent always gets what you can’t use! And during the even-numbered dry times, you need to survive on what you’ve collected before (or can beg from your opponent). Suddenly, those friendly hand-outs start to dry up and you’re left wishing you had planned better! The final item I’ll mention is the upgrade system. Each card you add to your upgrade area pertains to a specific section of the board. You can add cards that trigger when you clear your goods, or that pertain to field resources, storage additions, or producing goods. There’s also phase specific and end game scoring options too. There are no limits on these areas, so you can have as many upgrades as you choose in each area. The shared field has varying yield based on the type of year. Water is always available. Game Experience: To sell a recipe you must have all of the available resources ready in your storage. You then place the card face down on either the brewery (for beer) or the bakery (for bread). These spots are then occupied until cleared or you upgrade your abilities to hold more than one card. It’s Time To UpgradeWhen you use the upgrade function you slide the card under the player board at the equivalent space for the upgrade. Beer & Bread is a multi-use card game for two. Its clever structure of alternating rounds adds a fascinating twist on player interaction, card drafting, and resource management. 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.

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. If you’re ending a dry year, any harvested cards are discarded as are those in the exchange slots. Each player then gets 5 new cards starting with the first player ready for the next fruitful year to begin. Scoring… Simple As Sliced Bread Produces the beer/bread by paying the recipe’s requires resources from their personal stone (which maxes out at 9 unless you have an upgrade that increases storage space – see below; or The last few turns can seem pointless if you are not able to sell any more beer or bread or play any cards that will effect final scoring. This is especially annoying if you watch your competitor play one final scoring point card on their last turn. 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.

1 Review

Windmill– When all the cards are used in either phase, it’s the windmill phase. The player with the fewest stored resources gets the windmill meeple (signifying that they will go first in the next year). Then you re-seed the fields with the required number of resources depending on whether you are moving into a fruitful or dry year. When you use a card for harvesting you place it face up in front of you. You then collect the resources along the top of the card and place them in your storage. If you play another card on top of this first one you place it so that the resources of the first card are still visible. You then collect all of the resources on the new card and also of any of the previously played cards resources if they match the new card. 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!

Dry years are an altogether leaner affair. This is where previous round planning comes into the fore. Did you plan well when wheat and barley were plentiful? Did you harvest heaps of hops and rye? Founded on the fruitful lands of an erstwhile monastery, two villages have held up the dual tradition of brewing beer and baking bread. While sharing fields and resources, they still find pride in their friendly rivalry of besting each other’s produce.

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.

Seeding– this is where you fill the fields on the board with resources for later taking. Very handily indeed, the board shows how many of each resource is to be laid on the fields in both types of year. Fruitful has more of everything, but the river always contains as many drops as are available to “seed” the board with. If there aren’t enough in the supply to seed fully, use what you’ve got. The years play out over the same 4 phases (seeding, cards, actions, and windmill). But what each of those phases actual entails differs depending on whether you are in bountiful or brassic times!As mentioned, our designer adds layers of decision-making that provokes pondering and contemplation. The versatile multi-use cards deepens the complexity when cleverly integrated with alternating seasons. The latter one depicts the rounds played in Beer and Bread. They are characterized by abundant, fruitful seasons and the challenging spells of dry ones. Both impacts directly how players acquire their card and indirectly in terms of the utilization. This ever-shifting seasons keep us always on our toes. Learn how to play Bear & Bread board game - we're rules teaching in the clearest, concise way, so hopefully you can skip most of the rulebook and just play! The restriction of only allowing one beer and one bread to be produced at a time prior to clean up is a nice wrinkle. It lends itself to the diversification of final scoring, but it also requires a strategy for resource collection and goods availability. It’s most efficient to play an upgrade card when both slots are filled, but this isn’t always possible as card options dwindle over the course of each year. Thankfully upon game end you still get to keep the goods produced even if they’ve not been added to the clean-up piles. The upgrade action adds cards to related areas on your side of the board which provide boosts to certain actions or phases of a round. 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?