Final Score: 4 stars – Deftly balances the design space between alternating rounds, multi-use cards, and quality goods production. Each year has the same phases. But what you do in those phases can depend on whether it is a fruitful or dry year.

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! 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. 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… The gameplay for Beer & Bread doesn’t look mean on the surface. You have to give extra resources up which might not sit well. But there’s a chance that you’ll be able to do it when your opponent can’t use them. And that turns a sour ale into something much more palatable! 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!

1 Review

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 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. A game of Beer & Bread runs over the course of six rounds, representing six years – which alternate between fruitful and dry. In each year, fields are first seeded with resource markers, then cards are distributed. In the action phase, cards are then played in turn. Each card has three sections: Harvest & Store, Produce & Sell, and Upgrade & Clean. However, only one of the actions can be used at a time. The players must therefore think carefully about which action they want to use next. The fruitful years are particularly challenging, because in these years the card hands are swapped after each turn.

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?Everything in this game screams resource / card management from the limited storage to the upgrade spots. A great example is how the sold beer & bread cards remain at either the brewery or bakery until you do the upgrade option at which point they are cleared from the board and you can sell more goods again. 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. Join our Discord channel for board game talks, chatting, and connect with others alike - https://discord.gg/JUNsVty 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? 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.

If a player produces beer or bread, that card is slid into the bakery/brewery slot face-up. The resources are returned to the general supply, and then the card gets flipped face-down. It will stay in that slot until clean up. Beer & Bread gracefully dances with its artful balance of constraints and limitations. Surprisingly, the game does not feel restrictive or punitive, even when an occasional misplay occurs. Take the resources throughout both fruitful and dry seasons, for example. Granted, the fruitful is more bountiful than the dry, yet scarcity could still persist. Hence, players must strategically harvest resource. It paves the way for more substantial production down the line. 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;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! 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. 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!

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. 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: Now, some cunning farmers might initially believe that a straightforward path to winning the game involves focusing solely on either beer or bread. Well, once again, that’s not the name of this game. It’s Beer & Bread. It’s very fortunate, Scott Almes foresaw this possibility and has deftly woven a simple yet effective solution to close this loophole. He dictates that both villages will only score the lower tally between both commodities.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. Find out how you can be part of Meeple University member to get access to exclusive perks, like exclusive badge next to your name (when commenting on our videos), and emojis in chat and live stream chats! : But I am not here to give you my views – the epic blogger, Neil P aka Board Game Happy, has done a fabulous job and you can read and watch that here. Instead, I am going to tell you how to play the game. Not win. I rarely do that at any table. But at least give you the run down of a game in play! A Brew For Two