[TiGD] Deconstructing "Lost Cities"

"Lost Cities" by Reiner Knizia. Originally published by Kosmos in 1999. Review by René Wiersma

Overview

Lost Cities is a two player card game, played with a customized deck of 60 cards. There are 5 suits (colors). Of each color there are 12 cards - numbered 2 to 10 plus 3 "handshakes". Game play is straightforward and bears some similarities to traditional card games such as Rummy and Patience. Scoring in "Lost Cities", however, is a bit more intricate than in those traditonal card games.

The combination of straightforward game play coupled with a more complex scoring is a concept that appears is many of the designer's games, for example "Ra", "Taj Mahal" and "Africa". However, scoring in "Lost Cities" is less intricate than in those games, befitting a game of this weight and complexity.

A hand typically lasts around ten minutes. The rules advise the players to play 3 hands and to add up the score for each hand. The player with the highest total score wins the game.

Theme

Thematically, this game is about setting up and embarking on archeological expeditions to ancient sites during the nineteenth century. Before embarking on such an expedition players may wager on how well they think they will do on a certain expedition. The game play - theme link is very abstract. Although there's a certain building up of excitement and a sense of discovery as the higher cards are drawn and/or played (very nicely depicted by the card art) there's very little actual simulation of setting up archeological expeditions.

Structure

Lost Cities' game structure is very simple. Cards are shuffled and each player starts the game with eight randomly drawn cards. Players alternate turns until the end condition of the game - exhausting the draw pile - is reached. Then scoring takes place, based on how well players did in the expeditions they started.

A player's turn consists of playing a card, or discarding a card, and then drawing a card. Cards are played to one of five private rows (one row for each color), or discarded to one of five, face up discard piles which are shared between both players (again, one pile for each color). Finally, a card is drawn from the face down draw pile, or from the top of one of the five discard piles.

In detail...

This game has all the classic Knizia hallmarks. Game play itself is simple: play a card or discard a card - draw a card. There are only a few restrictions in where you may play a card: a card must be added to a row of its corresponding color, and the numbers in the row must be in ascending order (you may start a row with any number of handshake cards).

The scoring works as follows. For each row/color the player played at least one card in, the player does the following:
1) Add up all the numbers in the row, minus twenty.
2) If the player started the row with one handshake, double the outcome. If the player played two handshakes triple the outcome. If the player played all three handshakes quadruple the outcome.
3) If the player managed to play 8 or more cards in that color, add 20 points.

The fact that twenty points are deducted from the initial total, forces the player down a certain path, because there's no turning back once he has started a row. This makes the choice of which rows to start very important. However, the decision of which rows to start has to be made early on in the game and there's often very little information to base that decision on, because the majority of cards is still in the draw pile when those decisions have to be made. This makes the decision to start a row a strategic gamble, based on long term probabilities. The handshakes emphasize this strategic gamble, as they multiply a player's potential gain or a player's potential loss.

Another function of the handshakes is that they enforce assymetry of the values of cards. For example, a green 4 is worth more to a player than a blue 7 if that player started his green row with a handshake and his blue row without a handshake. The handshakes also enforce assymetry of the values of cards between both players, making the decision to discard certain cards that are useful for the other player a bit trickier. For example, a player may decide to discard a green 4 if the opponent started the row with a green 2, but not if that opponent started the row with a green handshake.

The twenty points bonus is a typical "tipping point" scoring trick and makes the decision to discard potentially useful cards for an opponent an even trickier one. It also introduces a nice risk/reward dilemma which may pop up during the end game: is it worth it to hold out a bit longer to try and get that eighth card, or is the potential loss greater then the potential gain?

The interaction between players in this game takes place in what players discard, or in what they choose not to discard because it could be potentially useful for the opponent. This is a subtle, indirect form of interaction, but one that certainly has an impact on the decisions players make during the game.

A nice side effect of drawing cards from the discard piles is that it can be used to prolong the game for a few turns. This may be useful if a player has a number of valuable cards he wants to play before the game ends. This itself provides another risk/reward dilemma as by prolonging the game by drawing useless cards from the discard piles a player may miss out on valuable cards that could have been drawn from the draw pile.

The tension in the game, and the reason why players make certain choices, comes from what the the scoring mechanism awards. Although a player can always either play or discard any of his eight cards, the actual number of realistic choices is much smaller, because the way the scoring clearly rewards certain choices over others. This is typical of many Knizia games. There aren't many rules that restrict players in what they can and cannot do. Instead Knizia uses only a few basic rules for the game's framework and he relies on the scoring mechanism to motivate players' decisions and guide them along certain paths. For example, the way the scoring mechanism works in "Lost Cities" it is often a tricky proposition to discard a card that is useful for an opponent. The rules don't forbid it explicitly; players themselves may decide if and when it's worth the risk to discard a card that is potentially useful for an opponent.

Conclusion

In my mind "Lost Cities" is a good example of an "impressionistic" game. Knizia needs only a handful of brushstrokes (rules, components) to create an engaging game. It shows that a clever scoring mechanism is a great way of creating excitement and encouraging players to play a certain way, instead of relying on fiddly rules to enforce the desired player behaviour.