A long time ago, I wrote an article about beer and homebrewing. And if you’ve watched the Malts and Meeples videos, you’ll see me enjoying a good beer, though, none that I’ve homebrewed recently. Homebrewing is one of those hobbies that got set to the side for a little while, but that I’ve always loved and want to get back into, and then at GenCon I demoed a game called Homebrewers. I thought that the game was fun, but decided not to pick it up right away, and then later it was sold out. Fast forward a few months and I picked it up and just a few days ago, I got it to the table again.

In Homebrewers, you play one of several unique homebrewers who are trying to brew their best beers for Summerfest and Oktoberfest. You’re brewing beers in four different categories; ales, porters, stouts, and IPA. To do this, you are rolling dice on your turn which will give you actions that can be sanitizing the brew system, adding grain, adding ingredients, and brewing beer. Every time you brew a type of beer it goes up on a track which will determine if you come in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in Summerfest or Oktoberfest. The ingredients are one area, besides each homebrewer has a unique power, where you add ingredients to your beer and it can make your beer worth more, or teach you something to improve another beer, or give you extra quality on the beer that you brewed so you advance you further on that beers track. At the end of the game, the person with the most points from the beer that they’ve brewed and prizes they’ve gotten, and goals they’ve completed wins the game.

The dice adds in a random nature to the game as you can roll them once. But to help counteract that, if you roll all of the same symbol you can reroll. Plus, you can always pay a dollar to tip the side a die is on to another side. So you have some control over the dice, it just costs you something. But if you’re out of money, which can happen, it isn’t the end of the world because after the dice are rolled players can trade a die for a die to get something what they might want. So if I have two dice that will allow me to either get or play a card, and I only want one of them, I could trade that other one to another player for something that I might need, such as sanitizing that I didn’t roll. That way you never feel completely stuck with what you’ve rolled and the dice don’t feel too random.

Homebrewers, at it’s core, is an engine building game. When you brew a beer, the ingredients on that beer can do several things for you. It can improve the quality of the beer, it can improve the quality of an adjacent beer, it can give you money, or copy one of those previous ones. These ingredients are the cards that you can get and put into play. I like that you can use the cards for building your brewing engine, but what the cards don’t give you, when you brew, is any extra grain, or sanitizing or anything like that, it’s just the things I mentioned above, like money. But all the cards are multipurpose. If you use them as an ingredient in brewing, they stick around on that type of beer for the rest of the game. But, you can also use the play card action to play the card for another effect. This could be sanitizing and getting a grain, getting two grain, or sanitizing twice. It might be a lot of money one time or it might be a bunch of points. So for every ingredient card you have to consider how you’re going to use it, do you want to play it for brewing a beer, or do you want the other things on it as a one time use. This also helps balance out the die rolls. Because if I have the ability to play a card and get two grain for brewing and I have two other dice that let me brew, I got a combo that I can work with.

In terms of engine builders, this is a pretty fast game, I think that some engine builders can overstay their welcome, for some, late game, because turns might take a long time because one thing triggers another thing which triggers another thing, and the turn cascades. In Homebrewers, the game lasts 8 months, so 8 rounds, at the start you’re not doing much, at the end, you’re doing a little bit more. You have some engine in play, but it isn’t a massive one, and it’s not going to cause itself to trigger multiple times or anything like that. Last time I played, and I needed to refresh myself on rules and teaching it, the game maybe took an hour and that was with teaching and looking up a symbol or two. If I were to play it again with the same person, I think we’d get through a game of it in half an hour. The game is pretty light for an engine builder as well, which keeps the game time down and the combo building simpler.

I do want to touch on the components a little bit. normally I don’t that much because game components are game components. But this one has nice custom dice, good card quality, and a nice board. The part that really stands out, though is the custom beer glass wooden pieces. There are five colors, and each of them has their own, unique, set of wood beer glasses. It’s just really cute and well done. And Tom Vasel in the Dice Tower review, because he doesn’t drink beer, that that they were odd bottles not glasses. Overall, this has really nice pieces and they are vibrant and look good on the table. The only odd thing about it, and I think that this is probably for a future expansion, all of the ingredient cards say if they are organic or not. All the cards, say that they are organic. So I’m guessing at some point in time there will be an expansion with other ingredients that aren’t raised organically and that they might behave slightly differently.

Overall, I like this game a lot. It’s a very fast engine building game with a theme that I really enjoy. If you don’t homebrew, will you enjoy this game? Yes, if you like beer. Because it is tied to the theme fairly well, I think that if you enjoy beer you’ll enjoy this game more. Not to say that if you don’t drink you won’t like this game, it’ll just lose some of it’s charm. Because one of the parts I like is when you add in ingredients, you can end up asking yourself stuff like, would I really want to drink a nutmeg and bacon ale? Probably not, but that blackberry stout, that sounds amazing. And, let’s be honest, I’d try any beer once with the ingredients in the game.

Overall Grade: B+
Gamer Grade: B
Casual Grade: B+

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