''Lost Cities'' is a 60-card
card game
A card game is any game using playing cards as the primary device with which the game is played, be they traditional or game-specific.
Countless card games exist, including families of related games (such as poker). A small number of card ...
, designed in 1999 by
game design
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er
Reiner Knizia Reiner may refer to:
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*Reiner Braun, a fictional List_of_Attack_on_Titan_characters, character in the anime/manga series ''Attack on Titan''
People with the given name Reiner
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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, causing Reiner Knizia himself to later provide semi-official 4-player rules.
Summary
![Lost cities](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Lost_cities.jpg)
''Lost Cities'' is a 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 that 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 that is started but not thoroughly charted incurs a negative point penalty (investment costs).
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.
The game's board, while designed to supplement the theme, is optional and consists only of simple marked areas where players place discards. 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
In a deck of playing cards, the term face card (US) or court card (British and US), and sometimes Royalty, is generally used to describe a card that depicts a person as opposed to the pip cards. They are also known as picture cards, or until the e ...
would represent investment cards, with numbered cards two through ten serving as the expedition progress cards.
Expedition 6: The Lost Expedition
At GenCon 2016, The Lost Cities: Sixth Expedition promo pack was given away. It contains a set of grey cards that are added to the base game as an additional expedition. The sixth expedition has the same rules as the other five.
In 2018, some newer international versions of Lost Cities are expected to also include Expedition 6 as well as two-sided boards. One side with five expeditions, the other side with six.
Awards
* Won the 2000
International Gamers Award
The International Gamers Awards is an award for strategy board games and historical simulation games.
Per their website, the IGAs ''were created to recognize outstanding games and designers, as well as the companies that publish them. The awards ...
.
Lost Cities: The Board Game
The 2008 game
Keltis
''Keltis'' is a board game designed by Reiner Knizia that won the Spiel des Jahres
The Spiel des Jahres (, ''Game of the Year'') is an award for board and card games, created in 1978 with the purpose of rewarding family-friendly game design ...
was re-themed and published in the U.S. as Lost Cities: The Board Game. The game supports up to four players and is a more complex version of the original card game.
Xbox Live Arcade
''Lost Cities'' was published by
Sierra Online
Sierra Entertainment, Inc. (formerly On-Line Systems and Sierra On-Line, Inc.) was an American video game developer and publisher founded in 1979 by Ken and Roberta Williams. The company is known for pioneering the graphic adventure game genre ...
for the
Xbox Live Arcade
Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) is a digital video game download service available through the Xbox Games Store, Microsoft's digital distribution network for the Xbox 360. It focuses on smaller downloadable games from both major publishers and independent ...
platform on April 23, 2008. The title supports both online play against other humans and solo play against computer-controlled opponents. It was delisted on 20 February 2009 after a merger between Activision and Vivendi. It is currently not available for purchase.
Reviews
*''
Pyramid
A pyramid (from el, πυραμίς ') is a structure whose outer surfaces are triangular and converge to a single step at the top, making the shape roughly a pyramid in the geometric sense. The base of a pyramid can be trilateral, quadrilat ...
''
References
External links
*{{Bgg, 50, ''Lost Cities''
Card games introduced in 1999
Dedicated deck card games
Reiner Knizia games
Kosmos (publisher) games
Rio Grande Games games