Bruxelles 1893: I Carried a Board Game Box Around the City It Depicts

There is something faintly ridiculous about walking across Brussels with a board game box under one arm and a camera in the other hand. I did it anyway, one afternoon, for this piece: Bruxelles 1893 photographed in front of the Palais de Justice, on the steps of the Mont des Arts, inside the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, at Sainte-Catherine, under the glass roof of the Musical Instruments Museum, and finally in the concourse of Brussels Central Station. That last shot is my favourite, for one specific reason: Central Station was Victor Horta's final project. The man who inspired the game designed the building I set the box down in. The circle closes on its own.

For a national day, it does not get more Belgian than this.

One clarification before we go further. This piece covers the Belle Époque edition released in 2023 by Geek Attitude Games, not the 2013 original. That is the copy on my table, expansion already in the box.

Publisher: Geek Attitude Games (Belle Époque edition, 2023), Pearl Games (original edition, 2013) · Designer: Étienne Espreman · Art: Amaury « Ammo » Dastarac (2023 edition), Alexandre Roche (2013 edition) · Players: 2 to 5 · Playing time: 1 to 2 hours · Age: 14+ · Language: bilingual box, French and English · Price: €59.95 · Mechanics: worker placement, hidden bidding, overlapping majorities, character cards, set collection, modular board

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A game born from an obsession with Horta

The title is not arbitrary. In 1893, Victor Horta completed the Hôtel Tassel on rue Paul-Émile Janson in Ixelles. Architectural historians treat it as the first true synthesis of Art Nouveau in architecture: exposed ironwork, the whiplash line, stained glass, daylight pulled down into the heart of the house. For twenty years Brussels became the laboratory of a movement that went on to reshape the whole of Europe.

Étienne Espreman, one of the three founders of Geek Attitude Games, loves that period enough to have made it the theme of his very first published game. You feel it at the table: the theme was not bolted onto an existing engine. You play an architect of the Belle Époque, you erect buildings, you produce artworks, you influence the market, you cultivate your social connections. Those are precisely the levers of an architect's career at the time, when talent alone got you nowhere and your address book mattered as much as your pencil.

For a debut design, the bet paid off spectacularly. In 2014, Bruxelles 1893 won the As d'Or in the expert category at the Cannes International Games Festival, France's most prominent board game award. That same year, Belgium pulled off a double: Concept, published by Brussels-based Repos Production, took the As d'Or Game of the Year. The two biggest prizes in French-language gaming, in the same year, on two Belgian boxes. That is the kind of statistic you bring up on the twenty-first of July.

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Sliding Belgian francs under your worker's feet

On your turn you place one of your workers on the action board to trigger that space: build, sculpt, sell, work your connections. Standard so far. Except that as you place the pawn, you also quietly slide Belgian francs underneath it. That money does not buy the action, you get the action regardless. It feeds a hidden auction that resolves at the end of the round: in each column, whoever bid the most takes the contested card and its bonus.

So every placement asks you two questions instead of one. Do I want this action now, and do I want that card badly enough to sink money into it that I will never see again? You can perfectly well win every action you dreamed of and lose every card because you underbid by a single franc. Or the reverse, hoover up the cards and find yourself broke when it comes time to build. Layered on top are overlapping majority tracks that reward you on one axis while exposing you on another, and an art market whose values shift depending on what everyone is dumping into it.

This is interlocking design in the best sense. Nothing sits in isolation: every coin you place speaks to three systems at once. If you want a reference point, think of the density of Troyes, released by the same Pearl Games three years earlier, plus the small piece of larceny that is an invisible bid hiding under a pawn.

What Belle Époque brings

A publishing story first. In 2023, Étienne Espreman bought back the rights to his own game through Geek Attitude Games, the company he co-founded. A designer taking back control of his debut title ten years on is not a common sight, and you can feel it in the care lavished on the object. The artwork was redone from scratch: Amaury « Ammo » Dastarac takes over from Alexandre Roche and delivers something more legible and better contrasted. That is a genuine gain in a game where you spend your time comparing columns out of the corner of your eye.

The integrated expansion adds a new material, two new notables, and above all an asymmetric variant: each player gets a different individual board and a specific power. That last addition changes the experience most. In a tightly optimised game like this one, asymmetry heads off the single-opening-line problem, that dispiriting sense that everyone is playing the same game in different colours. Expect an hour and a half at cruising speed, a solid two hours as soon as someone new joins the table. And one practical note for readers outside Belgium: the box is bilingual, French and English, so it plays perfectly well in English.

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What lands, and what does not

What lands is the elegance of the central idea. Plenty of games stack mechanisms on top of each other; this one makes a handful of them talk to one another through a single gesture, placing a pawn on top of money. Thirteen years on, the idea has not aged, and you can spot its influence in more recent designs that borrowed it openly.

The downside is the on-ramp. That 14+ on the box is not decoration. The first game is demanding: there are a lot of tracks to watch, the iconography is dense, and the real click about the relative value of cards honestly does not arrive until your second or third session. This is not a game you pull out on a whim late at night, and it is not the one I would use to introduce someone to worker placement. And if you already own the 2013 edition, the upgrade question is a fair one, especially at €59.95. The asymmetry and the new artwork justify the spend if you still play it regularly, much less so if it has been sleeping on the shelf.

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Verdict

Bruxelles 1893: Belle Époque is an expert game that earns its As d'Or, and the reissue is the best possible way in. It is for players who enjoy tense Euro-games where every decision costs something, and who accept paying for a first session in learning before the pleasure arrives. If you want a family game, keep walking. If you want ninety minutes of tight dilemmas in a beautiful wrapper, this is a safe bet.

And there is a bonus I did not see coming. I knew Brussels Art Nouveau the way everyone here knows it, walking past without looking up. After a few games I look at those façades differently, and I ended up hauling a board game box into Horta's station concourse for a photograph. Maybe that is Étienne Espreman's real achievement: designing a game that makes you want to go outside.

Happy Belgian National Day.