What else do you need? Well...

🍺 Beer & Bread is a 2-player game in which you play as two neighbouring villages in a friendly rivalry of baking bread and brewing beer. At first the theme didn’t speak to us at all, but reading a bit about the mechanics plus seeing Scott Almes as the designer sparked our interest! ☺️

You play over 6 rounds - every odd round is considered a fruitful year, and every even round is a dry year. The phases of these two types of rounds will have slightly different rules.

Multi-use cards are the heart of the game. 🧐 Each round you will have 5 of them - you can play these in 3 ways!

👆 Harvest resources according to the top of the card from the shared fields that you fill up at the start of each round. If you place a new card for harvesting later on, you add it to the previous harvest card(s) and get every resource shown. However there is a twist: you only have 9 storage space for resources at first - if you get more than you can store, the access gets offered to your opponent.

👆 Bake bread or brew beer: pay the resources shown on the middle of the card and place the card face down on the bakery or brewery.

👆 Upgrade: tuck in the card under the board so only its bottom part is visible to get an ongoing ability or end game bonus.

During fruitful years you will keep swapping your cards with your opponent after each turn. This might help mitigate draw randomness, but it also makes planning harder because you can’t be sure which cards you’ll see again. 🤔 Dry years help with this a little, because you take back every card you used for harvesting and you don’t have to swap hands. So you could play some cards to harvest during fruitful years and then collect their recipes in the dry year in peace. I still found it difficult to fulfill contracts because getting the needed resources might be tricky.

One final cruel twist comes with the game’s scoring: you calculate your points from beer and bread, but only get the lower of the two as your final score, so you have to balance both well.

This game is not love at first sight, nor is it at first play. But the dynamic is interesting enough for us to explore it more.🙂