This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: Lost Cities
Designer: Reiner Knizia
Year: 1999
Country: Germany
Publisher: KOSMOS
A two-player card game, Lost Cities is an interesting example of the relationship between the theme and the mechanics. Narratively speaking, each player mounts expeditions into various fabled lands, and the success or failure of those expeditions determines who has enough points to win. If you don’t manage to gather enough support for an expedition, it fails and may even inflict penalty points.
But in truth, this game is very much mechanics first, story last. You have a deck of cards of five different colors, running from 2 to 10 in each color. You have several handshake cards for each color, which act as point multipliers for your wins or losses. Thus, using them is always a risk.
There’s a small board displaying the five different colors or lands.
Players take turn playing a card and drawing a card. When it’s your turn, you can play a card onto your side of the board in front of one of the color spaces. This means that you now have an expedition planned and you’re gambling that you’ll have enough resources to insure its success. If you don’t want to make a move, you can discard a card onto the board, where the other player may later pick up the card if they so desire.
Once you have started an expedition, you try to place as many cards as possible there in ascending order, from 2 to 10. Thus, you might place the following cards on yellow: Handshake, 2, 5, 7, 8 and 9. This would mean that you’d have a multiplier and a total of 31 points there. However, 20 points are always deducted, so that your actual final score for that color would be 11 x 2 = 22.
If instead you’d only been able to play the following: Handshake, 2, 5 and 7, you’d end up with (2 + 5 + 7 – 20) x 2 = -12 points.
Two things quickly become apparent when you play: Point scores vary wildly depending on how your plans work out, and calculating them is more complex than in most games.
I used to play different card games with ordinary playing cards when I was a child, a result of a card game book I got as a Christmas present one year. Lost Cities reminded me of those memories.