Lost Cities
I bought Eileene a new copy of Lost Cities for Valentine’s Day. We had one, but she left it at Expedior when the company died, so we haven’t played for a few years. This two-player card game deserves more attention than it gets. Play is swift, elegant, and a fine compromise between depth and simplicity.
The deck is composed of five suits. Each suit has cards numbered from 2 to 10, plus three “investment” cards, which multiply your score for a suit, positive or negative. Each suit represents an archaeological site, and players are archaeologists staking their professional reputations on uncovering significant portions of them.
Play proceeds by playing one card, then drawing one card. Cards may be played face-up into a player’s own stacks, representing continuing work on archaeological exploration, or discarded face-up into five discard piles, separated by suit. Cards are either drawn from the face-down deck, or the topmost of any of the five discard piles. A game ends when the deck is exhausted (which means the last card never comes into play), and scores are tallied.
For each suit in which a player has played cards, his base score is the total value of cards played, minus 20. Twenty points of excavation is considered an unremarkable performance; more earns some professional reputation, while less is a professional failure. Each investment card played in a suit magnifies this score: one investment doubles the score; two investments triple the score, and all three investments quadruple it. If a player is so fortunate as to play eight or more cards in a single suit, he earns a 20-point bonus. Any suit the player plays no cards in scores zero; he has staked none of his reputation on the dig.
The catch that gives Lost Cities its interest is that cards must be played in ascending order, and investments must come first of all. Playing a large card shuts a player out of the opportunity to add a smaller card to his scoring stack, should he draw it later in the game. Playing a small card, on the other hand, leaves the player susceptible to the chance that he won’t draw sufficient large cards to reach the 20-point dividing line between a positive and negative score. Investments are even riskier commitments than low cards, both because they are score multipliers, and because they reduce one’s ability to predict whether the 20-point limit is attainable – a player only sees the eight cards in his hand at a time.
The key to the game is timing and minimizing risk, committing to developing a suit only when sure of scoring. Unfortunately, the eight cards in your hand only hint at what you might be able to score, rather than offering any solid information. Players often wish to play nothing at all, so they can see what the rest of the deck has in store, but, of course, they must play something. Discards can help hedge your bets by avoiding a commitment, but they are unsafe ways to buy time until late in a game, since a suit a player is unsure of scoring in is likely to be one his opponent holds in strength. Only once an opponent has played his green 6 can a player safely dump his green 2 and 5. Discards also create a small reserve of time at games end – drawing old discards slows the shrinking of the deck, so a player can avoid getting caught with two unused 10s in hand.
A game of Lost Cities takes no more than five minutes; we prefer to total the scores for three or more games in a single competition, to dilute the effects of luck. It makes a swell pick-up game, though the space required for fifteen potential piles (five per player, plus five discard) makes the game unsuitable for waiting rooms and bus stations. Lost Cities is an excellent diversion for players who don’t like getting enmeshed in deep strategies, yet does not rely too heavily on the luck of the draw for excitement.