So...
Lost Cities
Collect the best sets of cards in up to five suits.
If you reckon you know your way around how Lost Cities works, you can skip the dry boring Contents and Rules Overview bits, and go down to the guts of What's Not To Like, and What Stands Out.
Contents
+ A deck of 60 cards in five suits, oversize (2.75"x4.25" / 7cm x 11cm), standard card stock, full colour.
+ A board, Z folded, being basically designated places for five discard piles.
+ Rulebook.
What's in the box? (And, for that matter, the box.)
The cards are black bordered and covered front and back with scenes evoking the ambience of exploration. The relevant information on the cards is the digit or icon shown (like standard playing cards) in the top left and top right corners, allowing fanning in either direction. The artwork in each suit depicts a progressing trail of an "expedition" for that suit, and in a nice piece of graphic design each suit's scene is colour dominated to make the suit colours... a yellow dessert suit, blue underwater, green jungle, white snow, and red firey lava.
Minor component gripes...
+ I'm not fond of like dark-bordered cards. They look great for about ten minutes, but show up usage very quickly.
+ The cards being as oversize as they are, your kids may have trouble shuffling the deck.
Lost Cities Rules Overview (You can of course skip this bit.)
Objective Balance your commitment to an appropriate subset of five possible suits so as to maximise points.
Setup Shuffle the cards thoroughly and deal 8 to both players.
Layout The layout provides the structure of this game. There are five discard piles which players share, one pile for each suit. And the players each have their own space to develop a face-up run in each of the five suits.
A Player Turn... Play a card. Then draw a card.
Play a Card in ONE of the following ways:
+ Discard a card face up on top of the matching suit discard pile
+ OR Start a new face up suit they haven't yet started
+ OR Add a card to one of their own existing face up suits
+ Each suit includes three multiplier cards, which can only be played before you play numbers in the suit.
+ When adding cards to suits, the new card must be higher than any card the player has face up in that suit. So generally players try to start with low cards, and when the high cards are played then the suit is exhausted even if lower cards emerge later on.
Draw a Card either from the top of one of the five face up discard piles, or else from the face-down deck.
Scoring when the deck runs out is simple arithmetic, but non trivial amounts of it. Each suit has to be calculated. If the player has no cards in the suit it's worth zero. Otherwise, add up the numbers, subtract twenty, multiply by the multiplier. A suit of 8 or more cards gets bonus points.
The board has one function... it makes a tidy layout obvious, which helps make the game structure even clearer.
Notes On Play Feel
Players will observe each other, and what you see will influence what you do, but there's no direct interaction.
The twenty point penalty on each suit you start drives much of the feel of this game. It means, if you start a suit you are commiting to playing at least three and probably four cards in that suit just to break even. Since you only get to play 22 cards during a hand, it's extremely unlikely you'll break even in all five suits. If you do start all five suits, you aren't leaving a lot of excess cards to actually score positive points with. Which all means you have to pick your suits carefully.
So you'll want three suits. Sometimes you want four. But which three or four is the question? There's not enough space in your hand to expect to develop a confident combination of cards before starting a suit. It's especially tough for your opening choices, which are largely guesswork from what's in your hand. As the hand develops, your opponent's plays will give you clues about where they have strong cards and this can guide you somewhat on which third or maybe fourth suit you might start. And furthermore, there ARE only five suits... two players, five suits, but you want three or four each? There's going to be some... competition.
Discards are also interesting. Every time you discard you forgo the opportunity to add a scoring card to your display and thus your final layout will have one less card than your opponent. Of course, they sometimes may choose to discard as well. And if you discard suits you don't want, you're probably discarding cards that help your opponent.
Even the multipliers require careful consideration. They aren't worth points on their own. Every multiplier card you play is also one less actual number card to score with. A display with only three suits but with 9 multiplier cards is likely to score fairly poorly! Balance is needed.
Which all adds together to make some crazy indecision moments. Start a risky suit? Discard a card (sacrificing points and probably helping your opponent)? Or give up waiting for the "8" or "9" in your best suit and play the "10" now, thus closing your option to play more to the suit later.
Rules Complexity
I assess in order to play Lost Cities you need to learn about 7 basic pieces of info before you start, with about 11 in total. You need all 11 concepts by the end of the first hand.
For comparison:
Ra: 10 .. 14
Chess: 9 .. 12
Settlers of Catan: 12 .. 19
Puerto Rico: 20 .. 31
Ticket to Ride: 11 .. 11
Bohnanza: 9 .. 9
Carcassonne (H&G): 8 .. 11
One of several fan designed accounting sheets, to help tally scores.
So What's Not To Like?
So after all the "irrelevant" waffle above that I hope you skipped if you weren't interested, here's the juicy bits...
Theme? The "theme" here is only as good as your own creative imagination. The gameplay makes no attempt to replicate any functional aspect of the game setting. The back of the box teaser, which is also the introduction to the rules, starts:
"For the daring and adventurous, there are many lost cities to find and explore. The search can take you to the Himalayas, the Brazilian rain forest, the ever shifting sands of the desert, ancient volcanoes and to Neptune's Realm."
Nice plug on the (excellent) artwork there, but nothing to do with the game play.
It's a Card Game. This is a Card Game. This is not a "strategy board game". You could play it with a standard deck of cards, if it wasn't for the fifth suit. An importer of games told me the inclusion of a board in a game box changes the tax category and makes it cheaper to bring into the country. "Oh", I said, "so that's why there's a board!" And being almost a "standard" card game, it's unlikely to wow you with a sense of uniqueness or sparkle.
Low interaction. You can't attack, rob, trade, or in any way directly interact with each other.
Though what you do will influence your opponent's decisions.
Luck is a significant influence in this game. The obviously worse player may well win hands. You can't win a hand without enough of the high cards to score with, or rather you can't win if your opponent has the flexibility of having all the high cards.
Generally, Lost Cities is played over a series of hands which tends to balance this out somewhat.
Too much shuffling! A hand plays fairly quickly. The nature of play sorts the cards. Then you need to "unsort" them before the next hand.
Too much math for some people. Having finished the hand, you're likely to spend more than a few seconds adding up the scores. Some people prefer games where the score is a little more immediately obvious, such as on a score track or just "I have the most money" or even "I'm the last one standing". This is not those games... you will have to calculate the score.
Very little strategic depth. It's a card game. It has luck. Each hand is quick. Instinct and many plays will help a player learn to win more often, where strategic analysis may yield little insight.
Burnout! A lot of people (myself included) comment that while they had a bit of fun with this for a while, eventually the same sort of gaming itch was scratched better by game X.
X is different for different people, which speaks to the fact the Lost Cities has a combination of characteristics all it's own.
Rinse and repeat. The lighter and simpler a game is, the more likely you are to feel the play becoming repetitive. Lost Cities sits well within this category.
Of course, many cultures include some simple traditional game/s that fit this description but are played religiously.
Price. It costs how much? For a deck of cards!? Bleah.
Cards cards cards cards. (Card backs.)
So What Stands Out?
Despite some seemingly damning thoughts above, Lost Cities maintains a steady following and a top 100 spot. Key points make this the right game for the right people at the right time.
It's Two Player.
Ambience is infused in the artwork. Each suit, the lowest card shows the beginning of a trail of exploration which slowly expands until the climactic discovery of archaeological artifacts when you reach the final "10" card. Since the cards are played in increasing sequence, each suit draws closer to its ultimate goal as the hand progresses.
It's a Card Game. While being "just a card game" might be a downer for a die-hard strategy board game player, this signficantly improves its perceived accessibility to non-gamers and casual gamers. "Oh, cards, yeah lots of people play cards... ok I'll have a go."
Very simple rules add to the accessibility.
Intuitive skills. There is in fact quite a degree of skill to winning more often than your neighbour. It's the kind of skills that don't yield easily to analysis, though a few basic pointers can start you off. But it means more casual gamers are more likely to have and develop those skills on par with the die hard strategy analysts.
Non aggressive. Your fates are entwined. But you can't actually play destructively to your opponent's position. The best you can do is manage to deny them cards they want, and even that requires you draw those cards in the first place.
Addictive. The flip side of "rinse and repeat" is that, for such games, more people tend to find them mentally relaxing and addictive.
Quick. A hand of lost cities takes only a few minutes. You'll want to play several hands for a game, but that means 20 minutes is quite viable.
Each suit of cards progresses through a single scene, showing a detail portion from start through to destination.
Overall Lost Cities is often touted as a "gateway game". The usefulness of this thought depends on "gateway to what"? Lost Cities is not a strategy board game, so it can't be a gateway to strategy boardgaming. But it might be a gateway to playing "non-traditional" games.
Even more, "Lost Cities" is often cited as a "girlfriend" game, which I believe is a misdirecting comment. It's simple, accessible, admits skill but has lucky outcomes, potentially acceptable to non-gamers... male or female, friend or lover. When you get down to "what kind of game should I try for my girlfriend" it's much more important to ask "what kind of person is my girlfriend" rather than getting caught up in the supposed list of "girlfriend" games. Equally, don't be specifically put off if you're wondering what to start your husband on.
Eventually, you are likely to stop playing Lost Cities, as we have. In the meantime, you are likely to get (at least) multiple playing sessions of one-on-one time with someone, and possibly another notch in the "we play games together" cane. Take it as light fair and enjoy it for what it is... a simple card game with hidden nuances you can explore and improve on, yet a game which anyone can and will win even with disparetly skilled players at the table.
Posted Sat Feb 9,2008 09:07 am
