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Lost Cities – The Card Game
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Description
Lost Cities: The Card Game is from the Kosmos two player line. The game is very similar to Lost Cities: The Board Game, but is specifically designed for two players.
In Lost Cities: The Card Game, players are trying to lead successful archaeological expeditions in a variety of territories, whilst their opponent is doing the same thing. Players run their expeditions using cards in their hand. There are cards numbered two to ten for each of the expedition tracks, as well as three handshake cards for each colour. The handshakes act as multipliers for each track. The first handshake doubles the score on the track, the second triples and the third quadruples the score. However, the handshakes act as multipliers for negative as well as positive scores, so players need to be wary.
On their turn, a player can either play a card from their hand to their expedition, or they can discard a card to draw a new one. Players must play cards to their side of the expedition board in ascending order, with handshake cards placed first. However, if they discard a card, this goes in the middle of the expedition board and can be taken and used by the other player.
At the end of the game, players calculate their points. If they have not started on an expedition track they receive no points for that track. However, on each track which has been started, players start at a points value of minus 20. Players therefore need to have played cards worth at least 20 points to make a profit on the expedition.
There is an element of luck as to when cards are drawn. There is also the strategy of working out whether it is worth starting on a particular track and which card to discard when.
Player Count: 2
Time: 30 minutes
Age: 10+
Reiner Knizia’s Lost Cities is a very well established set collection card game for two players. Released in 1999, Lost Cities is cited by BoardGameGeek as Knizia’s most widespread game to date. At over 20 years old, is Lost Cities still able to stand toe to toe with the new kids on the block?
Discover Lost Cities
In Lost Cities, two players go head to head as they explore a variety of terrains. The players attempt to complete suits of discovery cards and rack up points in the process.
Setting up the game can be done within a couple of minutes. The box includes a central discard board and a pack of 60 beautifully illustrated cards. To start the game, each player gets dealt 8 cards to their hand, the rest of the cards get added to a central draw pile… and that’s it, you’re good to go!
Lost Cities plays out like a game of expedition chicken. It’s a game where you don’t want to give away worthless cards because you know how much they are worth to your opponent. You’ll sit there, cluttering your deck with these cards. As you wait, your opponent gets closer to giving up drawing cards, still hunting for the very card you hold. Finally, once they play the next card in the sequence, they prevent the use of the lower scoring card, allowing you to discard it. There lies the fun of Lost Cities.
How to play
Teaching the game is about as easy as setting up the game. Each suit represents a different expedition, the numbers in the corner represent the number of points you’ll gain when playing that card. Players must pay 20 points to mount an expedition, so think carefully before jumping in. Some cards do not have numbers, instead they feature handshake icons, these are wager cards which act as multipliers.
During the game, players have two main choices – play a card or discard a card.
Play a card
Cards must get played in ascending order but you do not need to play every card in sequence to score points. The sequence can, if you wish, start with up to 3 wager cards of that colour, be careful though as a wager will also multiply minus scores. Expedition cards are numbered from 2-10 with only one of each number per suit in the deck.
To get a better understanding of why you would want to discard a card you need to look at how points get calculated.
Scoring the game
The scoring of the game gets done in steps:
- Add up the discovery points from 1 expedition
- Take off the 20 point expedition cost
- Tally your score so far
- Multiply your score by the number of wager cards + 1
- 20 Bonus points get awarded for expeditions with 8 or more cards
- Repeat the above steps for each expedition mounted then total all expeditions together
If you were to lay down 3 wager and 5 points worth of cards, the score for that expedition would be -60. This is because you will have paid 20 points to begin the expedition, that leaves you with -15 points which is then multiplied by the number of wager cards + 1.
Simple? If you find this daunting then a quick online search for ‘Lost Cities score calculator’ brings up sites that do the scoring for you. You will need a pen and paper to keep score between rounds as there are no scoresheets in the game.
Before beginning the game you should decide how many rounds you intend to play. The winner is the person with the most combined points by the end of those rounds. The manual recommends 3 rounds, whilst that’s usually a good amount, you may wish to have a practice round with new players first.
Discard a card
Whether you want to clear your hand of unwanted colours or maybe you have cards in your hand that you’ve drawn but can no longer play. In these instances discarding your cards is a good way to optimise your hand without mounting more costly expeditions.
Draw a card
Once you’ve played or discarded your card, it’s time to draw. This can be done either from the face-down deck or from the top of any of the face-up discard piles.
There’s an element to the game which was completely overlooked by me the first time I’d played Lost Cities. By drawing a card from the face down pile you are moving one step closer to the end of the game.
During that first game, my wife caught with my trousers down as the game ended abruptly, leaving me with my top scoring cards in my hand. I’d realised too late that there would only be 1 more turn. But all is not lost, you can buy yourself a little more time during the game by drawing a previously discarded card and hope your opponent does the same.
The game ends when the last card gets drawn.
The Components
My edition of the game is over 20 years old but the game has evolved very little over those 20 years. The theme is spot on, I love that the discard board is designed to look like an explorer’s desk, it also has a nice linen finish. The artwork on the cards give the sense of adventure and the beautiful pencil illustrations fulfil the brief of colour coding each suit.
Whilst I do enjoy other hand management games such as 6 nimmt! and find them great fun to play; Lost Cities has the added benefit of being something that you want to show off. It’s something you want to get out of the box just to look at it.
Like most card games, the box is fairly small, making it ideal for when you go away on your own adventures. One downside is that the discard board is tri-folded and doesn’t always sit completely flat.
Final Thoughts
I really enjoy Lost Cities but it’s not one of my wife’s favourites. I feel that her melancholia towards it is largely down to the potential for large point swings, especially when not planning ahead. The tightrope you start to walk along when setting up expeditions can be wildly affected by your opponent but also by the luck of the deck. The amount of downtime for tallying up required at the end of each round doesn’t help me to sell the game to her either. That said, it will be in our bag the next time we go away and she does enjoy it.
So it didn’t quite tick the box I’d planned for it to after buying it as a game to get us through the pandemic lockdown, but it doesn’t make it any less a good game. As lockdown is slowly getting relaxed, Lost Cities will be making its way to my parents house where I know my dad will love it. He will no doubt feel smug holding the 9 and 10 that I’m desperately trying to draw while secretly, I’m preventing him from doing likewise.
So should you buy Lost Cities over 20 years after its release?
If you love beautiful artwork then buy this game. Do you like going head to head with others? Then buy this game. If you love the theme of adventure then buy this game. Do you enjoy showing others how good your mental arithmetic is? Then most definitely buy this game. If you already love and own this game then keep exploring with Reiner Knizia’s The Quest for El Dorado.
Lost Cities may be old but I’m yet to see another game improve on it.
A good two player game is a tightrope act of tension and deception. You have to simultaneously think like the other player and yet shield your mind from their intrusions, as you engage in an arms race to become the winner. That’s a good two player game. A great two player game however is an arms race of the most undignified nature, with you and your opponent making a frantic frenzied dash towards the finish, where the only person in the way of your victory is your own foolish hubris. No game better exemplifies this than Lost Cities.
You and the other player are competing to find lost cities, represented by five (or six in the case of the more advanced version) coloured panels on the central board. You find these cities by playing cards from your hand, each with a value of two to ten, onto the coloured areas. On each turn you have to either play one card from your hand to one of your expeditions or the global discard pile for that colour and then pick up one card from the draw pile or one of the discard piles. After the main draw pile has been depleted, the player with the most points (in terms of card value) totalled across the expeditions wins the game.
With this description, Lost Cities doesn’t seem revolutionary or indeed complex. It essentially sounds like a competitive game of solitaire. Like the best board games however, Lost Cities takes this simple concept and spices the mix up with the most human of vices: Gambling. Yes, Lost Cities is a game all about gambling. You may be fooled by its theme which suggests grand adventure, but you’d be wrong dear reader. In this game we’re off to see a man about an expedition.
The first gambling-based rule I neglected to tell you earlier is that every time you place a card down for one of the coloured expeditions, you automatically lose 20 points. The only way to get out of the negative is to keep playing cards into this expedition. What’s devilish about this rule is that you could spend the whole game collecting a full set of cards but then before you can play them, your opponent takes the last card from the draw pile; leaving you 20 points shy of scoring zilch. This means you’ll have to start playing cards into your expeditions from the get-go to ensure you manage to fulfil your exploring ambitions, but ultimately whether you get to succeed in these goals is a gamble.
The second rule that I didn’t tell you was that the deck of cards doesn’t just contain numbered cards from two to ten. It also contains the key item that takes the core betting mechanics at the heart of Lost Cities and takes it to ridiculous heights: the wager card.
Before you place any cards down in one of your expeditions, you can choose to play as many wager cards as you want of that colour. After you’ve placed down a numbered card in that expedition, you can no longer play wager cards. The wager cards multiply your score for the expedition by however many wager cards you’ve played plus one. One wager card means you get to double your score, two wager cards triple the score and three wager cards (the maximum number of wagers you can possibly get for a given expedition) quadruples the score. Some of you may have already arrived at the question of “What happens if you get a negative score for an expedition you’ve put three wager cards on?” and to that I say, pull up a calculator and find out what -20 x 4 is.
These rules make Lost Cities a great two player game for varying levels of thought. The amount of number crunching and sussing out of your opponent that you can do makes it a game which you can really ponder over. Simultaneously, the silliness of the wager cards and the initial -20 points can encourage you to go completely bananas and invest in all five expeditions and see how low your score can go.
Having gushed about Lost Cities for the last 700 or so words, let me deflate this review slightly by going over my major gripe with the game: the theme. I realise that exploration is a very common theme in lots of media, whether it be films, video games or board games. This theme of new world exploration however feels incredibly dated from a saturation point of view and, more importantly, from a cultural view. I realise that Lost Cities is quite an old game, so at the time it may not have felt as dated but games often undergo quite drastic theme changes. To give an example of a Reiner Knizia game with a drastically changed theme, Quo Vadis? is a game where you play as senators of the Roman republic conniving their way to the top. Its remake, Zoo Vadis, is set in a zoo where the animals are competing to become the mascot for the zoo. I will end this section by saying something positive about the look of the game. I like how massive the cards are. It’s great to pair slamming down these whopping big cards with the worst decision you’ve ever made in a card game.
All said, Lost Cities is absolutely worth your time. It perfectly walks that fine line of luck and skill, allowing the best elements of both to shine through, giving a two player experience which never overstays its welcome and always leaves both players wanting just one more game.
Zatu Score
You might like
- Beautiful illustrations
- Quick to set up and pack away
- Small box is Ideal for taking on your adventures
Might not like
- Tallying up the scores at the end of a round can be a little tedious
- Head to head nature isnt for everyone