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. 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. Final Score: 4 stars – Deftly balances the design space between alternating rounds, multi-use cards, and quality goods production. 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.

And so, in the end, we answered none of the questions that were heavy on our minds in the introduction, but we did come away with a new appreciation for designer Scott Almes. This small box game has found a way to enliven the two-player design space. Beer and Bread feels like a mini-Euro tribute but provides enough twists and turns to be worthy of your most refreshing mug of ale and a nice cut off of that golden brown bread. Beer & Bread is easy to teach, fun to play, and is going to stay in the collection for a while longer. 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. During the dry years the amount of resources available to be harvested is reduced but you no longer pass your cards to your opponents, so with careful planning in the fruitful years you can load up your hand with cards you know you can play during the dry years. The dry years also introduce a card exchange of three cards which you can swap cards from your hand to use immediately. How Much Is That Bread Worth In The Window 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.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. 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 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! 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. 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!

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? 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, 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!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 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. 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! 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. 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.