Boshkung Social and Haliburton Highlands Brewing are two craft breweries featured in a new board game called BrewHouse.
Creator, Doug Salloum, a retired brewer, and his wife, Ruth-Ann MacKinnon, were in the County last week to unveil the game.
Now retired, Salloum said brewing was the most fun job he ever had, and he had a lot of jobs.
“After I retired, I decided to share the brewing experience with others … by designing BrewHouse, a board game for people who like craft beer,” he said.
“The game is realistic without being too technical. It is easy to set up and to play. You don’t need to know anything about brewing to play, but along the way you will learn a lot about running a brewery.”
In the game, each player starts with a game board representing the basic brewing processes found in any brewery. Players also start with some capital, called beer bucks.
Players first choose a brewery card. These cards represent partner breweries from around Ontario who helped make the game happen. When a player chooses a brewery card, they “are” that brewery for the game. They also acquire a player advantage specific to that brewery.
Players then choose which beers they want to brew, from the pack of 50 different beer cards. The beer cards provide recipes for classic beer styles. They also have beer trivia (on which players may be tested during the game).
Players spend their beer bucks to purchase the brewing inputs they need (malt, hops and yeast) and move their beer, represented by keg-shaped markers, through each stage of the brewing process. Once the beer is in the tap room, players can sell it for more beer bucks.
How many beer bucks are earned when selling the beer depends on the style of beer and the quality of beer produced, as in any craft brewery.
Salloum said players earn brew master credits along the way by meeting sales milestones, by having a great range of beers in their tap room, by making money, and by strategically investing their profits.
A wild-card element is that players must select a card from the ‘things happen’ deck after every turn and respond accordingly.
The winner is the player with the most brew master credits at the end of the game.
Braden Labonte turned the imagined brewery into a game with a German biergarten colour palette, keg-shaped markers, beer bucks, and breweryappropriate ‘things happen’ cards.
Salloum said friends, family, and former colleagues, game-tested and suggested tweaks and rules changes along the way.
Then came digital-age marketing challenges. Salloum said social media and other sites “promised a lot and cost a lot, but ultimately failed to deliver.”
So, he fell back on real relationships, with real people.
Now that he has the finished product in hand, after 3.5 years of work, Salloum said he’d never seen anything like it, and said he felt “a combination of pride and relief. Happy and relieved, because it does look great.”
MacKinnon added, “one of my favourite features of the game is players have the option to put their ‘profits’ into social or environmental investments, such as hosting a music festival or installing a carbon-capture system.
“This is a fun new game and we are really thrilled it will be available in cottage country this year,” she added
BrewHouse is available from partner breweries across Ontario (including Boshkung and Haliburton Highlands) and from a Shopify site (in late March or early April).
