Autumn Games - Lost Cities

The first game of our Autumn game-a-thon, Reiner Knizia's Lost Cities.

Lost Cities is a pretty simple card game with lots of depth.  The deck is 60 cards, comprised of 5 suits (representing five expeditions) with 12 cards each.  Each suit has three "investment" cards and nine cards from 2-10 value.  On your turn, you must play one card to one of the five expeditions or discard a card onto the center board.  You must then draw one card from the deck or a previously discarded card from the center.

Whenever you play to an expedition, you must play a card higher than the previously played card and investment cards may only be played as the first cards to an expedition.  So if you've played down a 4, you can't play an investment, or the 2 or 3 cards but can play anything higher than 4.  At the end of each of three rounds, when the cards run out, you score each expedition by adding the value of all the cards you've played and subtracting 20.  If you don't reach 20 points in an expedition, you get negative points.  If you're over 20, you score positive points.  Investment cards multiply the result by either 2, 3 or 4, depending on how many of them you played.  You also get a 20 point bonus if you've managed to play eight cards in an expedition.  For example, if in one expedition you played investment, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, that would be worth 26 points (33-20=13 x2 =26).

The trick in Lost Cities is playing only expeditions you can get above 20 points, lest you lose points.  Careful discarding is key.  Sometimes your hand will consist of cards you don't want to play, so you discard and draw from the deck hoping you'll get a card you can play.  But discarding makes a card available to the other player, so you have to be careful not to give them something they can use.  Balancing these is what makes Lost Cities so challenging.

Unfortunately for me, this game was over after the first round.  Carol scored an astounding 181 points, having scored high in three expeditions plus getting the 20 point bonus for each.  I had an average score, but was so far behind I had little hope of catching up.  

Scores per round and final scores were:

          Carol:   181 + 52 +   68 = 301

          Ipecac:   36 + 35 + 103 = 174

The first game goes to Carol.