Lost Cities is one of the original, classic “couples” games, a strictly two-player game that’s quick to learn, has enough luck involved to allow someone who hasn’t played many games to compete fairly with an experienced gamer, and that has plenty of interaction to keep the two players engaged. It’s from Reiner Knizia, whose games are all built on a math foundation but keep that stuff under the hood. It has since fallen behind several other two-player games (notably Jaipur) in my own rankings & my house, but I’ll always have a soft spot for it because it was one of the first two-player games I ever tried and liked.
Kosmos has now released a new version of the game, Lost Cities: Rivals, that allows up to four to play at once, simplifies the scoring, and mitigates the luck factor at least a little bit so that players can strategize a little more over the deck. It still works with two players, but the design here, giving players money to bid on cards, is clearly aimed at getting the whole family to the table at once. It’s a nice filler game, nothing too novel, but again very easy for anyone to pick up and certainly appropriate for younger players (the box says ages 10+, but I’d say this is fine for kids as young as 8), and priced appropriately at $14.95 list.
The basic premise of Lost Cities: Rivals is the same as the original – players try to build ‘expeditions’ of cards in five colors by acquiring cards numbered 2 through 10 and playing them in ascending order. That is, once you’ve played a red 4 card, you can’t play the red 2 or 3 any more. The Rivals deck has two copies of each card numbered 2 through 5, and just one copy of each card numbered 6 through 10. On a turn, a player may uncover the next card in the deck and place it on the table for all players to see, or may bid on all face-up cards on the table, starting an auction that proceeds around the table until all players pass.
The scoring in Rivals is much simpler than in the base game. The original had you start with -20 points in any expedition you started, so you’d have to make up the deficit by playing enough cards to that expedition, with each card worth the points of its numerical value. That’s all gone in Lost Cities: Rivals, as you start with zero points in each expedition, score one point for each card you play to any expedition, and get a straight eight-point bonus for any expedition where you play at least four numbered cards.
Rivals also carries forward the ‘wager’ cards for each expedition; you can play one, two, or three such cards to any expedition before you play any numbered cards to it, and those increase your bonuses for each card to 2, 3, or 4 points. (The eight-point bonus for playing four cards is unaffected.) Each player begins the game with two random wager cards, while the remaining ten are shuffled into the main deck.
The game moves very quickly since turns are short and decisions aren’t really that complex – it gets tricker towards the end when you’re hoping for certain cards and might preserve your coins to try to nab something important – with a full game taking under 45 minutes in our plays. It’s also very compact, like the original, something you could easily take with you on the road in its box or just by bringing the deck and throwing the coins in a small bag. I don’t think this will be in regular rotation here, though; it’s certainly light and simple, but I think we want a little more fun or strategy from games we’ll play often. This felt a bit too familiar, and other than the few times we were all seriously bidding on a set of cards, there wasn’t enough to get us laughing or taunting each other to make me want to pull the game out again.