Contents: Game board, 60 playing cards (45 Expedition Cards and 15 Bidding Cards), rulebook.

Overview

It's a game of the Kosmos 2-Players game series, a group of easy, quick and not too expensive games. Lost Cities is substantially a traditional card game where players build collections in order to score at the end of the game; each game is played on three manches and the winner is the player with the most total victory points.

Expedition Cards are divided in five different colors, with values ranging from 2 to 10; for each color are also included 3 Bidding Cards with no value, that players can use in order to increase scoring at the end of the game.

During his turn, each player must play or discard a card, then draws one. An Expedition Cards is played starting a new collection or adding it to an existing one, but in this case its value must be higher than previous cards; furthermore, if a player wants to play Bidding Cards, these have to be first in a collection and can't be played after Expedition Cards. If a player can't play a card (or if he does not want to play one), he has to discard a card, being aware that it could be useful for his opponent; in fact, during the draw phase (the last of each turn) players are allowed to draw either from the face down deck or the discard pile.

The game ends when the face down deck is depleted and each player scores his collections. Each collection is worth the value of the cards, with a fixed 20-points malus (expedition expenses), if the collection contains one or more Bidding Cards, its value is multiplied by 2, 3 or 4; finally, if a collection includes at least 8 cards, then it gets a 20-points bonus.

Good points

Lost Cities is very easy, quick, with a nice look, well suited for anyone, even unexperienced players.

Bad points

As for most games by Reiner Knizia, there isn't any connection between the game and its theme: forget anything about lost cities and archaeology, this is just a card game. The bad thing is that Lost Cities is also quite plain as a traditional card game, is heavily influenced by luck and the same playing board is useless and you can well leave it in the box if you want. Probably, after some games, its fate is to stay on the shelf...

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