I’m a big fan of Lost Cities the Card Game. While on the surface this game appears to share the same basic structure that made the card game a blast, it instead falls flat for me. Lost is the tension of the game. There is really no fear of ever having a negative score, never any major risks to take and never the ability to shutout your opponent and make a great comeback.

For example, in the card game you had various multipliers that you could play to increase your score for an expedition. Even if you had 6 blue cards to start with, you would want to hold out waiting for 1 or more multipliers to come your way. But that’s where the tension comes in. What if the multipliers are buried? What if your opponent is holding them? You risk either throwing cards away or you are starting other expeditions that you have no idea if you can complete. Or you start it only to get that sour taste when the next card you draw is that faithful blue multiplier that you could kick yourself for not waiting on.

But what if you had no blue cards, but all three blue multipliers ~ do you risk it? None of that exists now. Instead, you have a large player that counts as x2. It doesn’t really matter how much you even have when you place him, because if you don’t gather the cards you need you can simply land on arrow tiles that allow you to advance the large figure forward. Not once did I fail to receive a 100 point bonus by having him advance the whole distance in an expedition.

Because of those arrow tiles, the fear of making a bad play is erased. For example, in the card game nothing was worse when you threw down a red multiplier and all you have is a red 3 to go with it ~ and then your opponent places a red multiplier down, and then another red multiplier down. You have that sinking feeling that you just made a huge mistake, as they must be overly confident in their hand. Heck, they could even rub it in that you made a bad play for fun. It provides that tension that just is missing from the board game. In every game I almost always went on expeditions with all 5 adventures and only once did I have a -5 score, and technically it wasn’t really that bad because I picked up a 15 point victory tile. I watched what my opponent played, but what they played never really had any bearing on what I was doing.

I feel like they took a great game and tried to add features that instead of advancing it, it just made it flounder. Even the nice little touch of showing the cards actually advancing on a path has been replaced with the same image of the final goal ~ just smaller or bigger. So they even lost that touch.

Overall, if I had a young nephew that I wanted to introduce into games, I would pull this game out. It’s easy to learn, not too hard to make mistakes and while I would say it’s luck based, it doesn’t even require you to be all that lucky. Otherwise, it will stay on my shelf and when I want a quick, fun game to play, I’ll grab the card game. Oh ~ and those cards are still holding up well after hundreds of plays. The board game cards are already doing poorly after a couple of of plays with 3 shuffles.