Better late than never. Brew Crafters finally made it to the table, and I’ve played four games this week (3P, 2P, 4P and 4P). I like it - it is clearly inspired by Agricola, but like Dinosaur Island it has several phases where you place workers on different boards. I’d say it is somewhere close to in between Agricola and Dinosaur Island in mechanics. It is very thematic, and it feels like you’re running a small craft brewery that wants to make unique stuff, before you start chugging out as much product as possible to pay the bills. Everything is a common supply, and all players can get all the upgrades to the brewery, but there are local partnerships and specialist workers (randomized supply) that are a common pool - so it is more “choose your strategy when you can” rather than the “make a strategy from your private randomized setup” of Agricola. Except for the asymmetrical upgrade boards. There are many different paths for specializing your brewery. So far my impression is that the game feels very scarcity driven - you can’t do everything, and you need to decide what to focus on, and which scarcity you want to mitigate with partnerships, workers or brewery upgrades.
All in all, Brew Crafters is a thematic worker placement games that I think will have a place in the rotation for the time being, but will compete with Dinosaur Island for hitting the table.