Thames & Kosmos 691821 Lost Cities: The Card Game | Who Will Discover the Ancient Civilizations? | Strategic Game, 2 Players | Ages 10+, 7.9'

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Time to travel once again to distant locations, but in Lost Cities: Rivals you might find yourself running short of cash to take the trips you want! Whilst I do enjoy other hand management games such as 6 nimmt! and find them great fun to play; Lost Cities has the added benefit of being something that you want to show off. It’s something you want to get out of the box just to look at it.

Reiner Knizia: "The original version that we developed is exactly what Jay [Tummelson, owner of Rio Grande Games] has now published [LCBG]"

As you go up the columns you’ll hit icons that let you accelerate up a column by duplicating a number elsewhere. Or run up past a pot and you can cross off an artefact icon that again rewards points at end game. You’ll also be hopefully climbing your way out of negative scoring territory and into positive points! I don’t want to say combo-tastic yet but I’m sure you can see how rewards might roll into each other! Haha

My edition of the game is over 20 years old but the game has evolved very little over those 20 years. The theme is spot on, I love that the discard board is designed to look like an explorer’s desk, it also has a nice linen finish. The artwork on the cards give the sense of adventure and the beautiful pencil illustrations fulfil the brief of colour coding each suit. During that first game, my wife caught with my trousers down as the game ended abruptly, leaving me with my top scoring cards in my hand. I’d realised too late that there would only be 1 more turn. But all is not lost, you can buy yourself a little more time during the game by drawing a previously discarded card and hope your opponent does the same.There are cards with 5 different colors/symbols, each corresponding to one path; in addition, each card shows a number (0-10, twice each).

Note: the rules for LCBG have the Keltis rules as variants, and have the board elements necessary for #1 above. The replay value with Lost Cities is infinite. The game changes every time, for varying reasons. It’s partly because of each of the following.This is not just a rule difference, as the scoring is different for the monuments/stones based on the number collected. You start off with eight cards. There are five differing colours of cards which correspond to five paths on the board. The object of the game is to move your people along the paths gathering points as you go. To do this you plot a route by playing the cards – these have numbers on them from zero to 10. Isle of Man, Isle of Wight, Northern Ireland and the Scottish Highlands) may take longer to reach you. On a turn, you can either reveal the top card from the current pile (adding it to the display) or auction the cards on display. In the auction, you must raise or pass, and once only a single person remains in the auction, they pay the amount bid to the center of the table, then take any cards that they want to play and start or add to expeditions. Placing the same number in an expedition is okay. The auction winner can also place one card from the display in the box out of play. The auction winner ends their turn by adding a card to the display. Each player guides a team of explorers on up to five expeditions. To advance along an expedition path, a card in the path’s colour must be played for each step forward. The card must be of equal or greater value to the player’s card previously played on that path.