A New Game! Lost Cities

I like to listen to a podcast called The Dice Tower with Tom Vasel and Eric Summerer. These gentlemen talk about board and card games and provide reviews and insight into the board gaming hobby that I have found entertaining, satisfying, and educational.

Tom Vasel has said on a number of occasions that one of his favorite games to play with his wife is Lost Cities. Mark and I are always looking for good two player games, so when we saw this one on the shelf at Viking Hobby - one of our FLGSs, we just couldn't pass it up and decided to give it a try.

According to BoardgameGeek.com, "The object the game is to gain points by mounting profitable archaeological expeditions to the different sites represented by the 5 colors. On a player's turn they must always first play one card, either to an expedition or by discarding it to the appropriate discard pile, and then draw one card. There is a separate discard pile for each color and a player may draw the top card of any discard pile or the top card of the deck. Cards played to expeditions must be in ascending order but they need not be consecutive. Handshakes are considered lower than a 2 and represent investments in an expedition. Thus, if you play a red 4, you may play any other red card higher than a 4 on a future turn but may no longer play a handshake, the 2, or the 3."

When you score your expeditions at the end of each hand (you play three hands per game) you first count up the numbered cards and then subtract 20 to pay for the expedition. Yes, you can end up with a negative number. Then you add in the handshake investments depending on how many were added to the tableau. If there is one handshake you multiply your score by 2. Two handshakes mean you multiply by 3 and four equals multiplying by 4. This can make your positive OR negative score much larger.

On our first game we were just trying to figure out the scoring system so we didn't really deploy any strategies until the start of the third hand. By then our scores were well into the negative range. Once we were done, we wiped everything out and started again and did much better the second time. I won our second game with a score of 94 - 14. Even though the score gap was so wide, Mark and I both enjoyed this game and we are both looking forward to playing it gain soon.