Lost Cities

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Lost Cities

Designer	Reiner Knizia
Publisher	Kosmos Rio Grande Games
Players	2
Age range	10 and up
Setup time	2 minutes
Playing time	30 minutes
Random chance	Medium
Skills required	Strategic thought

Lost Cities is a 60-card card game, designed in 1999 by game designer Reiner Knizia and published by several publishers. The objective of the game is to mount profitable expeditions to one or more of the five lost cities (the Himalayas, the Brazilian Rain Forest, the Desert Sands, the Ancient Volcanos and Neptune's Realm); the game was originally intended as a 2-player game, but rule variants have been contributed by fans to allow 1 or 2 further players.

[edit] Summary

Lost Cities is a rather fast-moving game, with players playing or discarding, and then replacing, a single card each turn. Cards represent progress on one of the five color-coded expeditions. Players must decide, during the course of the game, how many of these expeditions to actually embark upon. Card play rules are quite straightforward, but because players can only move forward on an expedition (by playing cards which are higher-numbered than those already played), making the right choice in a given game situation can be quite difficult. An expedition which has been started will earn points according to how much progress has been made when the game ends, and after three rounds, the player with the highest total score wins the game. Each expedition which is started but not thoroughly charted incurs a negative point penalty (investment costs).

The game's board, while well designed to supplement the theme, is essentially optional and consists only of simple marked areas where players place discards.

Interaction between players is indirect, in that one cannot directly impact another player's expeditions. However, since players can draw from the common discard piles, they are free to make use of opposing discards. Additionally, since the available cards for a given expedition are finite, progress made by an opponent in a given color can lead to difficulty making progress in that same color.

[edit] Trivia

If Lost Cities had four expeditions instead of five, it could be played with a standard deck of playing cards. When doing so, the face cards would represent investment cards, with numbered cards two through ten serving as the expedition progress cards.