Have you ever read Shel Silverstein’s “How Not To Have To Dry The Dishes”? It goes about how you’d expect. I remember encountering it during our fourth grade class poetry show, at just the right age to both empathize with the “consent of the governed” of it, and have a vague crisis of conscience. After all, the story goes, to not have to dry the dishes, something has to break.
I was also nine for this story, and had yet to encounter the notion that dishes could be fixed.
All of which is to say that Broken and Beautiful is a game about kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold lacquer. Or silver, or platinum, but notably something shiny and obvious, marking breakage as a part of something’s story, and not the end of the bloody world.
In terms of the game, it’s gorgeously simple: get pottery! Break pottery! Fix pottery, at a cost. When you’re done collecting, score! It’s what I’m inclined to call “mechanically compact” – nearly every feature serves multiple purposes. Your candidate cards to choose from, on a given turn, are a quantity of (two per player) plus one, giving you extra options and, per the one left over, defining what type of dishes this turn are going to break. If the last card available is a cup, everyone’s cups shatter! Each different card type has a given cost to fix, which is also the gold you can sell it for when you first acquire it – no deciding later that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. And given that broken items are worthless, come the end of the game, you may want to! When an item is fixed, however, it’s not only untouchable – it will never break again – it’s worth more points than it was unbroken! (It puts me in the mind of wood glue, something else that feels like poetry and isn’t quite the point. I’ll drop the link.) Flip the card over, and bask in the improvements.
‘But Cassandra,’ you might ask, ‘if the back of the card is largely identical to the front, how does the deck work?’ It’s easy! The top card’s not a secret. In fact, that top card type will also break each turn, regardless of what you do. You see what I mean? Efficient.
When there are no longer enough cards left for a proper draft, the game ends, and each type of item is scored differently. Some have different stacking bonuses with others of their type; cups’ scores are multiplied when paired with saucers; teapots gain value by what else is of the same pattern/set. And then there’s serving trays and storage boxes, wooden items that cannot break, one of which scores a flat rate and the other per your remaining gold ingots! You can see, then, why I’ve never been able to predict which of us will win a game until we stop to score. With nine distinct scoring methods – who on Earth can?
