Break In 2013

Some of the most prolific designs of the last couple of decades come from teams of designers. Bruno Faidutti, a prolific French author, and Alan R Moon (who appears again later in this book) paired up in 2005 to create a game called Diamant, which later appeared as Incan Gold. The genre of this game is generally referred to as 'Push your Luck', wherein luck is mitigated by players' greed for more. Not unlike the television show Deal or No Deal, where players try for more and more cash by opening cases, some for good, some for bad, Incan Gold sees players flipping cards to gather treasure with some being traps. Our version, Break In, stays true to the formula, as players abseil into a bank, getting their mitts on as much dough as they can before alerting the guards.

—description from the designer

This game is part of Femtitva, a collection of 10 games by Scott Huntington that were inspired by popular modern games but can be played with a traditional deck of cards.

In Break In, a deck with 7-10s removed is dealt into 3 equal stacks (4 for 4 players), and each player gets to look at one stack before it's shuffled and placed face down (this represents "Scouting the bank"). Players take turns flipping a top card from any stack, which is either a guard (picture card) or cash (non-picture card). Two guards of the same suit end a round, with players still in the bank at that point gaining no cash; you only keep cash if you leave the bank on your turn, in which case you'll score points for things such as the pip values of cards in front of you. The player with most cash after 5 rounds is the winner.

—user summary