Game: Lost Cities
Date: 19-Feb-2007
Location: Home
Players: Daughter the Elder, Fraser aka Karlsen
Time: Thirty minutes

For the first time in about a week and a half Daughter the Elder was ready for bed early so there was time for a pre-bed game. Chess, no wait Balloon Cup, no Chess, no, no - Lost Cities.

She wanted to know if there was an advantage or disadvantage to going first (she doesn’t like going first in Puerto Rico because you don’t get Corn and in San Juan because you get less cards to choose from with the starting variant we play).

I told her that since we were playing three hands it would swap, so she elected to go first.

In the first hand even after advice not to start too many expeditions, she ended up with four - but then again so did I

None of hers were spectacular, mine were somewhat better.

DtE Fraser
27 58

In the second hand I thought I had a promising start with a red handshake, two, four and ten and I had picked up a second handshake and the eight within the first three cards. Unfortunately I didn’t pick up a single other red card until my last pick of the deck when I got the nine. Daughter the Elder meanwhile was specialising in blue and green. She managed to make an eight card expedition in blue where as I had two very mediocre expeditions and one that made a loss, the net result being that she leapt to the lead.

DtE Fraser
27 58
114 65

A fifty point deficit is not impossible to overtake surely?

We both ended up with four expeditions in the last round and both had a loss making one. I almost got the fifty points I needed, but my cunning plan neglected to take into account that Daughter the Elder would be scoring points in the third round as well

DtE Fraser
27 58
114 65
140 113

She told me that this was the first time she had beaten me in Lost Cities, well played that girl!

Fraser McHarg 19-Feb-2007

Great report!!

One of my favourite things is when I'm playing a game with my son and he manages to squeeze out a victory despite my best attempts.

Some other parents don't understand why I don't let him win every game (some struggle to understand how I can play at all). But aside from learning games where I'll point out moves and let him take back bad moves, generally we play to win. He knows that when he does win he has beaten a grown-up who is trying his best. If he loses then we have an after game chat about what he can do differently next time.

James

Congratulations to Daughter the Elder.

So Fraser how many years do you have left before she starts towelling you regularly?

Enjoy your victories now while you still can!

It depends on the game, she is already very competitive in most abstracts that we play.

And so the nature of humankind is revealed.

We are designed (like most of the animal kingdom) to ensure that the new generation is superior to the last.