Lost Cities: The Card Game

Basic Idea: You’re an explorer trying to get backing and trying to get your expedition as far as possible, but your arch nemesis keeps getting in your way.

Gameplay: Lost Cities is super easy and fun to play. It’s a two player game(though there are rules for four, but you need two sets)where you and your opponent try and lay down cards of the same suit in as close to consecutive order as you can get. On your turn you play one card and draw one card. You can play a card by putting it in front of you as part of an expedition or discarding it. You can then draw a card from either the draw pile or the discard piles. There are 5 different expeditions (colors/suits) and each expedition has 3 investment cards and 9 cards numbered 2-10. At the end of the game each expedition without at least 20 points (the numbered cards added up) is a failed expedition and you’ll lose points. An investment card must be laid down before any expedition cards and if the expedition is successful then you score multiplies. If it fails, you lose even more points. The game is over when the last card is drawn.

Overview: I really like this game. It’s fun and fast (very fast) and easy to learn. The theme has nothing to do with the game and if playing cards had 5 suits you could just use them. This really feels like a game you would want to keep out for when you and your significant other are waiting for a show to start or for rice to cook. Something quick to pass the time that doesn’t take too much thought. I wouldn’t list it as an all time favorite, but it’s definitely a gaming staple.

Lost Cities is about as easy to learn and simple to play as it gets. Even so, it provides significant replay value through the application of a couple of twists on traditional card gameplay that makes this one difficult to master.

Both players share a central game board with five discard piles, one for each colored card “suit” in the deck. Each colored “suit” consists of a run of cards from 2 through 9 and three “investment” cards. Simply build runs of numbers on your side of the board (much like solitaire). Because numbers must be played in order (i./e., you can’t play a “5″ after you’ve already played an “8″), and you can only hold eight cards in your hand, each player is forced to use the shared game board as “temporary storage” for excess cards.

This results in fierce battles between the players, each one strategizing about which suit to go for and when to begin drawing from the shared discard piles. Be careful! If a run of cards in a single “suit” doesn’t add up to 20 points or more, you’ll be penalized. Were you bold enough to play a few investment cards at the beginning (and only the beginning) of your run? Great! Your points are multiplied. However, if you don’t make it to 20 points, an investment card will multiple your penality!

Confounding all of this is the fact that each player must first play a card, then draw a card. This simple reversal of the standard card game mechanic provides a nice added challenge to the gameplay.

A great little 2-player game perfect for a quick pickup match or two.

Simply stated, this game is fast, portable, easy to learn, and, most importantly, fun. It is a two player back and forth game that revolves around a rummy give and take format. For those of you who are a little savvier with the gaming terms, it’s a modification on a trick taking. I have noticed that this style of game is a cheap and easy way to build tension and play through wild gambles paying off or blowing up in your face. Before I get off into my actual run-down, I will WARN you all, my beloved readers, that this game takes more brains to score than it does to play (not cool, bro… not cool).

So, the theme of the game is that you are on the hunt for lost cities. Each city is found at the end of a ten step journey. Each step of the way is represented by a number and each journey is represented by a different color. For example, if I go on the hunt for “Atlantis”, it will be done with the blue cards which number one through ten. There are five different colors/journeys you can go on. There are also backer/investor cards that can be played before the journey starts that will multiply your scores for good or for the bad. The more cards you play, and the higher those cards are, the better your score tends to be…. TENDS to be….

You will have your hand of 8 cards made up of random numbers and colors. During the turn you will put down a card and pick up a card. There are 5 discard piles, one of each color, and ten play piles, one of each color on each side of the player board (one set of play piles for you and one for your opponent). During the turn you will either play a card to your corresponding color’s play pile or the corresponding color’s discard pile. If the card is going onto a play pile, it must be a larger number than the card before it in the same color pile (if I have played a 4 as my last yellow card, my next yellow must be a 5 or higher). The investor/backer cards are played down before any number cards, and there can be up to three of them. After this, you draw a card from one of the discard piles or from the remaining un-dealt cards. You play until the last un-dealt card is picked up. That is how simple the game is!

Scoring is done like this, and you do this for each color/journey individually then lump the sum: Take each journey/color you attempted, subtract twenty, add the numbers on the cards, and then multiply that by 2,3, or 4 depending on the number of backer/investor cards that were played down before the numbers (if you played one investor its x2, two investors x3, and three is x4). There it is…. complex, mathy, and ugly….

Ok, now back to the good, AND THE REASON FOR ALL THAT MATH. This game is fun because you have to think before you start dropping cards. Because each color you start will ultimately cost you twenty points, you want to know that you will make your points back. The big points come from those investor/backer multiplying bonuses, but you have to make sure you clear your investment cost or you will be multiplying negative numbers and digging yourself a hole. If you don’t think you will get your points back, then you want to discard the cards you are not using, BUT THEN YOUR OPPONENT MAY WANT EXACTLY WHAT YOU DONT AND THEN YOU ARE HELPING THEM, BUT YOUR HAND IS TOO FULL TO MAKE GOOD MOVES SO YOU CANOIANSOPINVAIOANGPOUNRADINCAIUN…..

I think you get the idea. The seemingly overly complex math points system is what drives the game to be more than just a pick-up, put-down, trick-taking, rummy clone. It either rewards crazy gambles with blow-out style points or bone crushing debt. Even conservative players are forced to wait and watch for what the other player is going to do, in which wastes time and turns to put down point scoring cards. There is almost always a tough choice to make.

This game is great. It’s not SUPER great, but it is a good one. If my wife and I don’t have the time to play something like dominion, then this can still give us some quality bonding. I LOVE games that my wife will sit down and play with me because she is not a gamer. The math, to me, is not hard to do in my head, but for her, a pre-school teacher, it is beyond her desire to perform when she isn’t at work. Put a calculator in the box and your golden. Now get out there and game friend!

I’m the kind of gamer that loves virtually all games, be they tabletop, video, or otherwise. One could classify me as an Equal Opportunity Gamer, I suppose. That being said, I truly have a passion for tabletop games that are set up for two players as I, enviably, have a spouse who also loves games, and with two little demon-spawns running around, it’s in my best interest to get games that don’t need a legion of gamers, foaming at the mouth, or two hours, to play.

I recently had an opportunity to purchase Rio Grande Games’ “Lost Cities” on the cheap, and although I am not a huge Reiner Knizia fan, the price was right and a quick two-player game will certainly see more playtime than a game like Risk. When the package arrived, I was absolutely underwhelmed by the art, although I was hopeful that the theme was not the standard painted-on fare that Knizia is known for.

I cracked the box to find a small, rectangular play board with five colored rectangular areas, and 60 numbered, oversized cards in five suits each, carefully packed in a quite sturdy plastic, blow molded card holder. I was immediately and woefully unimpressed with the card artwork, and the fact that the cards are about as large as a moleskinne notebook didn’t help. Seeing as I paid for it, I figured I had better give it a go anyhow.

After perusing the rulebook, which thankfully was very concise and quite diminutive, it was apparent that the theme is, as I suspected, an afterthought. This game could’ve been about constructing torture devices or exploiting Mexican labor on a building jobsite, and it wouldn’t have changed a thing, and probably would’ve been more exciting. The lack of a strong theme isn’t truly a detractor from the game itself, but paired with the bland artwork, I was thoroughly bummed that this game was so simple looking. I soldiered on, regardless.

The essence of the game is that you and your opponent play as explorers, tasked to explore 5 ancient ruins on someone else’s dime, and in order to do this you have to build a deck of cards under each colored expedition space on the board by placing cards, on your side of the board, in sequential order. It sounds simple, but this is complicated by the fact that each color has three “investment cards” which depict the player making a back alley deal with some sinister art-collector investors, and these act as multipliers to your final score. There are tough decisions to be made both initially, and as the game progresses.

The gameplay itself essentially consists of playing a card onto an expedition or discarding a card onto the board, and finally, taking a card from the draw deck or from a card that was discarded onto the board. All in all, gameplay mechanics truly don’t get much simpler than this, but the decision making process itself is more challenging than one would expect. The random draw factor is the real “X Factor” here, and this is further hampered by the fact that if you discard a card to the board hoping to get a better card from the draw, you may allow your opponent may snatch it out from under you, helping them and leaving you sad and dejected.

The game immediately ends once the last card has been taken from the draw pile, and you tally your scores. This was hands-down the least fun part of the game, not only because I lost miserably every game we played, but because it involves some math, which is only fun to those who would rather be solving quadratic equations for “N” than playing games.

The short version of scoring is that any expedition you’ve started requires you to immediately take a -20 point hit, to cover the initial cost of funding the expedition. If you played investment cards on an expedition, but have no numbered expedition cards on top of it, it multiplies your investment loss. Conversely, if you did have some expedition cards on top of the investment cards, you subtract your initial “-20 investment” then multiply the sum of the cards to get your score for that expedition. This can be tedious, as you potentially have five expeditions to score, so if you are a little high, or failed math in grade school, you may be at it a while. Suffice to say, a pencil and some paper are good things to have when playing this game.

The good news, though, is that I found this game to be enjoyable. The gameplay is brisk, and you can expect to finish one round in about fifteen to twenty minutes. The rulebook recommends that you play three rounds and tally the scores to declare a winner, but we preferred to play single-round games sequentially to avoid having to remember calculus during the scoring. All things considered, we thought the game was fairly fun, albeit sterile. Despite my nitpick that the theme was absolutely irrelevant to the game, and even despite the bad card art, this is a game that we will likely play again.

Things I liked:
*Concise rulebook that can be read during one session on the can
*Two player game, expandable to four
*Brisk, easy to understand gameplay, that lasts 20 minutes a round
*The theme, while painted-on, was passable and made sense

Things I detested:
*The art was less attractive than “Bazooka Joe” comics, by several orders of magnitude
*The scoring, although not really that hard, was a pain and not intuitive
*Oversized cards were simply not necessary and not conducive to shuffling

Overall:
A decent, fun two-player game that you can use as a filler, or to play if you only have a half an hour to do something other than watch an episode of Matlock…again.

Rating:
3/5 Stars

My wife and I are always looking for a great two player game. So when my mother-in-law introduced this to us, we played it immediately.

COMPONENTS:

I love the artwork that is featured on the cards and game board. The scenes of jungles, mountains, deserts, submerged civilizations and (my favorite) volcanoes are beautiful and evoke a sense of adventure and wonder. The game board is unnecessary in game play, but is pretty nonetheless.

The cards are the main part and they shine. They are large and in charge. They are easy to shuffle, easy to work with. No complaints there.

GAME PLAY:

This game is one of the easiest games to learn that I have come across. Each person is working to get the most points on as many expeditions as they can. Investment opportunities come along in the beginning (hopefully) to create great point increases or to lose many, many points.

Larger cards can only be played on smaller cards and gaps cannot be filled in afterwards. During all of this, your opponent is working on the same expeditions as you.

There is a little strategy, like when to draw from the deck or what to discard and this adds a little more excitement to the game, but like others have said, luck plays a hefty role in the quest to find Lost Cities. Better cards may show up right after you need them. Frustration can swell fast, but luckily, this game moves fast. Soon it will be time to start another round.

SUMMARY:

Lost Cities is a fun and quick 2 player experience that is beautiful and easy to learn. It may be too light for a few people. but if you get the chance, definitely take the opportunity to get lost.