Board Game Review - Broken and Beautiful

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer. Something that might otherwise be discarded becomes something unique, valuable and beautiful. The game Broken and Beautiful uses the art of Kintsugi as the theme. 

The game is played over multiple rounds. Players take turns selecting cards to create sets of bowls, plates, cups, jars and other pottery and servingware. Players can either add the card to their collection or sell it (discard it) for gold to be used later. After each player has selected two cards through a "snake draft" process there will be two remaining face up cards. Those cards determine what will be broken. Any player with a matching type of pottery must "break" their pieces by rotating the card sideways. 

Broken dishes and pottery are worth zero points. Thus, players may use the gold they received when discarding other cards to repair their broken items. Broken items regain their original scoring potential while also gaining additional scoring benefits, making them more precious.

The small deck and simple rules result in a quick play time while still showing some depth of strategy that may have some tricky decisions. Depending on what cards are available, it can be tough deciding whether to take a card and use it to score or cash it in for gold in case one of your other high-scoring cards gets broken.

This is a great game to introduce new gamers to the idea of card drafting and set collection. The scoring of each different type of pottery is not terribly difficult, but the art and iconography make it a little tricky to quickly recall scoring methods in the middle of the game. The bowl cards and cup cards look rather similar to one another and were often confused. Some of the scoring behavior is unique enough and tough to quickly glean from iconography to warrant questions from new gamers.

Apart from that small quibble, this is a very solid lightweight game with enough strategy to be quite fun and interesting but not so heavy as to scare off new gamers. Plus, the concept of kintsugi is a lot of fun and really pretty.

4.5 out of 5 stars