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A good two player game is a tightrope act of tension and deception. You have to simultaneously think like the other player and yet shield your mind from their intrusions, as you engage in an arms race to become the winner. That’s a good two player game. A great two player game however is an arms race of the most undignified nature, with you and your opponent making a frantic frenzied dash towards the finish, where the only person in the way of your victory is your own foolish hubris. No game better exemplifies this than Lost Cities.
You and the other player are competing to find lost cities, represented by five (or six in the case of the more advanced version) coloured panels on the central board. You find these cities by playing cards from your hand, each with a value of two to ten, onto the coloured areas. On each turn you have to either play one card from your hand to one of your expeditions or the global discard pile for that colour and then pick up one card from the draw pile or one of the discard piles. After the main draw pile has been depleted, the player with the most points (in terms of card value) totalled across the expeditions wins the game.
With this description, Lost Cities doesn’t seem revolutionary or indeed complex. It essentially sounds like a competitive game of solitaire. Like the best board games however, Lost Cities takes this simple concept and spices the mix up with the most human of vices: Gambling. Yes, Lost Cities is a game all about gambling. You may be fooled by its theme which suggests grand adventure, but you’d be wrong dear reader. In this game we’re off to see a man about an expedition.
The first gambling-based rule I neglected to tell you earlier is that every time you place a card down for one of the coloured expeditions, you automatically lose 20 points. The only way to get out of the negative is to keep playing cards into this expedition. What's devilish about this rule is that you could spend the whole game collecting a full set of cards but then before you can play them, your opponent takes the last card from the draw pile; leaving you 20 points shy of scoring zilch. This means you’ll have to start playing cards into your expeditions from the get-go to ensure you manage to fulfil your exploring ambitions, but ultimately whether you get to succeed in these goals is a gamble.
The second rule that I didn’t tell you was that the deck of cards doesn't just contain numbered cards from two to ten. It also contains the key item that takes the core betting mechanics at the heart of Lost Cities and takes it to ridiculous heights: the wager card.
Before you place any cards down in one of your expeditions, you can choose to play as many wager cards as you want of that colour. After you’ve placed down a numbered card in that expedition, you can no longer play wager cards. The wager cards multiply your score for the expedition by however many wager cards you’ve played plus one. One wager card means you get to double your score, two wager cards triple the score and three wager cards (the maximum number of wagers you can possibly get for a given expedition) quadruples the score. Some of you may have already arrived at the question of “What happens if you get a negative score for an expedition you’ve put three wager cards on?” and to that I say, pull up a calculator and find out what -20 x 4 is.
These rules make Lost Cities a great two player game for varying levels of thought. The amount of number crunching and sussing out of your opponent that you can do makes it a game which you can really ponder over. Simultaneously, the silliness of the wager cards and the initial -20 points can encourage you to go completely bananas and invest in all five expeditions and see how low your score can go.
Having gushed about Lost Cities for the last 700 or so words, let me deflate this review slightly by going over my major gripe with the game: the theme. I realise that exploration is a very common theme in lots of media, whether it be films, video games or board games. This theme of new world exploration however feels incredibly dated from a saturation point of view and, more importantly, from a cultural view. I realise that Lost Cities is quite an old game, so at the time it may not have felt as dated but games often undergo quite drastic theme changes. To give an example of a Reiner Knizia game with a drastically changed theme, Quo Vadis? is a game where you play as senators of the Roman republic conniving their way to the top. Its remake, Zoo Vadis, is set in a zoo where the animals are competing to become the mascot for the zoo. I will end this section by saying something positive about the look of the game. I like how massive the cards are. It’s great to pair slamming down these whopping big cards with the worst decision you’ve ever made in a card game.
All said, Lost Cities is absolutely worth your time. It perfectly walks that fine line of luck and skill, allowing the best elements of both to shine through, giving a two player experience which never overstays its welcome and always leaves both players wanting just one more game.
