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Homebrewers is an engine-building and dice-trading game. Your dice represent the actions you can take, such as buying ingredients, participating in monthly events, adding flavors to your recipes, and of course, brewing beer! Homebrewers is played over eight months (eight rounds). Each month, you meet with the homebrewing club one weekend (trade phase) and take actions the other weekends (action phase).
You'll be crafting your own unique beer recipes in four categories (Ale, Porter, Stout, and IPA). Each time you brew a particular recipe, your quality level for that recipe increases.
You gain reputation in two main ways. First, by moving up the quality tracks for the four beer categories in order to win medals at Summerfest and Octoberfest, and second, by crafting your recipes to meet the particular tastes of a panel of judges at Octoberfest.
At the end of eight months, if you've gained the most reputation as your club's best brewer, you win!
- Thematic depth with strong engine-building feel
- Coherent theme with deck-building mechanics
- May be heavier than typical gateway titles
- Requires careful management of sanitation and customer flow
- deck-building with thematic beer development
- brewing beer and running a brewery
- economic, flavor-focused progression with a brewing theme
- Brew Crafters
- Rising Sun (engine interplay)
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Deck building — cards represent customers and recipes that reappear and re-engage over time
- deck-building — cards represent customers and recipes that reappear and re-engage over time
- dice actions and dice trading — dice determine available actions and can be traded to shape outcomes
- sanitation/quality tracking — sanitation levels impact beer quality and scoring
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
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- Home Brewers ... I love it because it does a great job of capturing its theme