Review: Broken and Beautiful (Left Justified Studio)

Broken and Beautiful, from Left Justified Studio, is a deceptively wicked little game.

The deception starts with the size of the box. Whenever we see a game in a tiny container, we wonder how much depth and strategy they can really pack in there. Broken and Beautiful completely fooled us.

That little box delivers a wonderful play experience built around drafting and set collection, and flavored with a delicious twist thanks to its thematic focus on kintsugi, the Japanese art of using gold lacquer to repair broken pottery.

Let’s sit around the table and get ready to assemble — and break — collections of pottery as we look at the top five things you need to know about Broken and Beautiful.

Starting the Game

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Setup begins by shuffling the 46 card deck. The first thing you notice about the deck is that the cards are double sided. This becomes important during play, because the top card of the draw deck has an effect on each round. More about that later.

Each card shows one of seven kinds of pottery, a serving platter, or a storage box. The pottery cards include the piece’s type, pattern, sale and repair cost, and how they score points. The serving tray and the box only have a sale cost and point value.

Start the game by creating the drafting area. Lay out cards from the deck until you have enough for twice the number of players plus one (five cards for two players, for example). The player who most recently did the dishes goes first.

Keep or Sell

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Each player’s key decision during drafting is simple: decide which card you want to take, then either add it to your collection or sell it for its gold value. On the surface, this seems like a very simple question, particularly since this is a set collection game, after all. But in practice, it’s a far more challenging choice.

Drafting happens in a snake (or switchback) order. The first player takes one card from the display and keeps or sells it. Play passes clockwise until all players take a card. Then the order reverses, with the last player taking a second card and so on until the starting player takes one of the remaining two face-up cards.

Now the craziness begins.

Break That Plate!

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Pottery is delicate stuff, so every round there’s a risk that things could break.

Players determine what happens by looking at the top card of the draw deck and last card left in the draft area. If either or both are pottery cards, then all of that type of piece breaks in every player’s collection. A gold card in either spot gives players a free repair. A serving tray or storage box has no effect.

Next comes the repair round. To repair a piece, players pay the piece’s cost in gold ingots. Players can repair more than one piece in a round, but the cost keeps increasing by one gold for each item repaired.

Paths to Points

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Point scoring sits in the middle of the tension between collecting, breaking, and repairing.

Each type of pottery earns points differently, usually by having combinations or matching sets of things. You want to assemble the most valuable mix of pieces so your collection scores the most victory points.

But you can’t just collect things — you also need to break and repair them. The game moves quickly, so you only have so many turns available to collect and fix things. Worse, broken pottery and unused gold give you no points at the end of the game.

Finding the Balance

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It’s fun (and a little hard) to wrap your mind around the idea that breaking your carefully collected stuff is a good thing, but thanks to the art of kintsugi, it is.

That twist drives the game’s strategic tension. Repaired pottery is worth more than the original was, so you constantly work that balance between collecting the best pieces, breaking them, and making sure you have enough gold (and time) to repair them afterwards.

Verdict

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Broken and Beautiful delivers a delicately tense game experience with more depth than seems possible to fit into a small box.

The tension comes to a head when you sit in the first position of the draft. Getting the first draw is important, but getting the last choice means that you decide what will break that round. The decisions get really hard when you’re picking between a valuable piece that matches your collection or something that’s going to set you up for a big victory point boost, provided you have the time and gold to repair the breakage.

We especially love how accessible Broken and Beautiful is for new players. Drafting and set collection are common mechanics that many people understand from regular card games. First-time players also get a boost against experienced opponents because the game starts them with a gold ingot.

Broken and Beautiful earns a high recommendation from both of us.