He picked it up on the market a few years back, and it's still in excellent condition*. This was his and my first play through.
Aim
The aim of the game is to assemble successful expeditions to various Lost Cities. This is done with cards of differing values from five different suits.
Gameplay
Each player starts with a hand of eight and takes it in turn to either place a card in an expedition or discard a card face up in the centre. Cards are numbered 2 to 10, and MUST be placed in ascending order, but they need not be sequential. So a 4 cannot be played on a 6, but a 6 can be played on a 4.
The five suits represent different destinations; Desert, Neptune's Kingdom, High Mountains, Jungle and Volcanic Caves (the latest edition has a sixth, but this was an earlier copy).
After playing or discarding, the player draws another card, either one of the face up discards or a face down card from the deck.
There are also 'Backer' (aka Handshake) cards, representing financial backing for your expeditions. Up to three of these can be played before placing any numbered cards, they are also tied to the suits.
Play stops as soon as the last card is picked up, so you can get caught out with good cards un-played in your hand.
Scoring
Expeditions are scored by adding up the numbers, but each expedition costs 20 points, which are deducted. The result is then multiplied buy the backer cards +1. This does mean that a negative score is made even worse as your backers want results, even at the cost of your success.
There are also bonuses for having enough cards in a run and penalties for only having backers and no expedition cards.
If this sounds complicated, it plays really smoothly. It's recommended to play three rounds, and we were well into the swing of things in the first round.
Conclusion
Lost Cities is a lovely little game. It doesn't take long to play, our three round game took less than 40 minutes and we were learning the rules as we went.
The card design is nice too, the cards show a panorama of the expedition drawn in a 1920s/30s style.
There's quite a bit of strategy for such a simple looking game; do you discard a card that your opponent will find useful? Do you risk playing that 7 on that 4, or do you wait to see if you can find a 5 or a 6?
Lost Cities is two players only, which slightly reduces its utility (suggestions for a four player variant are available on the website), nevertheless, it's definitely a high A Tier/low S Tier.
*I suppose this should ring alarm bells, it looked rather like someone had bought it, played it once and didn't like it. We really enjoyed it though.
