Beer & Bread

 

The Game 

Beer & Bread is a 2-player game about baking bread and brewing beer. You and your opponent are neighbours in the same village. While you are competing, you also share some resources. You score points for making beer and making bread separately. Your final score is the lower between these two. That means you need to be balanced in making beer and bread. 

The game is played over a fixed number of rounds, alternating between high and low seasons. One key difference between the two season types is how the cards are handled. The game is driven by cards. At high season, after you play a card, you give your entire hand to your opponent. He does the same. So you will keep exchanging hands. What this means is a card you want but do to play now might be taken by your opponent. Also when you have knowledge of both hands you can plan accordingly. At low season, there is no hand swapping. Your cards are safe with you. However in case you don’t like your cards, there are three cards in a public pool you can use. You may exchange one of your own cards with one of them. In this case, the card you give up may potentially be used by your opponent. That's something you have to consider. 

Cards are used in three ways. You can play a card to collect resources. Resources are limited in the common village fields and if they run out you will get less than what your card says. Also your storage is limited. If it gets full, you can’t dump your surplus. You must give the surplus to your opponent. Village etiquette says so. 

When collecting resources, you use only the top bit of the card. Within the same season, if you collect resources multiple times, playing cards in the manner in the screenshot above, you may get to collect extra resources. In this example because the water icons are connected, the second card gives you 2 water, and the third card gives you 3 water. The third card gives only 1 grain, since the grain sequence is broken in the second card.

You can play a card to fulfil an order. That’s how you score points. You spend the required resources. The card is placed face down in your bakery or brewery, temporarily disabling it. You need to clean up your work space before you can complete your next bread / beer order. That brings us to the third action type, which is the clean-up. When you play a card for clean-up, you clean both your bakery and brewery. Also that card you use turns into a permanent ability - an upgrade. This can be very helpful. Some upgrades let you collect more resources, some let you convert resources when you are short on certain types, some give you more points based on certain criteria. 

If used as an upgrade, this card lets you collect more water. 

You compare points after the last round, looking at the lower of your bread points or your beer points. The higher scorer wins. 

The Play

This is a pretty typical order fulfilment game. You collect resources to fulfil orders. Cards determine what resources you can harvest and also what orders you can fulfil. Every round you try to puzzle out what's the best you can do given the cards you have access to. It is challenging to match production and demand. During play there will be various tactical considerations. For example if you are going to overproduce and you will be forced to give the surplus to your opponent, if his storage is full too, or the surplus is something he already has too much of, then you don't really mind the overproduction. If you think he is aiming for a certain order, you can deliberately deny him by using the card for clean-up. There is meaningful player interaction, even though it is not very direct. 

The resources in the game are water and four different crops. 

At the end of our game I managed four each of beer and bread orders. Han did not do so well with bread orders, only managing two. 

The Thoughts

Beer & Bread is a pleasant two-player Eurogame which presents some challenge. It will work well as a spouse game if you are looking for something not too confrontational.