Within the deep, dank and often unhygienic world of board, card, and hobby games, the two-player card game Lost Citiesis pretty darn popular. Created by legendary designer Reiner Knizia, Lost Cities is considered by many as the classic “gateway” game – that’s basically a term used by gamers to describe games that normal people might enjoy. When a hardcore gamer wants to show a game to Aunt Marge...this is a popular choice.
So translating this popular card game into digital form makes sense. It’s easy to learn, has proven very popular and it plays relatively quick – usually in 30 minutes or less. The problem is some games translate well to Xbox Live and others – not so much. Lost Cities falls somewhere in the middle; it’s nowhere near as good as Catan or Carcassonne (which is actually better on XBL than in cardboard form). It’s a decent time killer and is best kept on the table rather than on the console.
The mechanics are identical to the actual card game but something is missing. Perhaps it’s too much of a casual game that something has been lost in translation – maybe it’s the actual face to face part that’s impossible to simulate even with a microphone/headset? The game’s AI certainly doesn’t help. While most people will play the game online against others, for those looking for a quick half-hour challenge from the AI will be sorely disappointed. The game, even on the hardest level of difficulty, is as dumb as a tree stump.
The object is to score points by playing colored cards on specific “expedition” tracks of the same color. Like many of Knizia’s games this one is very light on theme and is more of a math exercise. The game itself has absolutely nothing to do, technically, with exploration. It’s about cards and numbers.
When it’s your turn to play you can either start a new expedition by playing a colored card on its respective track (blue cards can only be played on the blue track, etc.) or play a card on an expedition that you had started on a previous turn. The numbers in each of the colors run from 2 to 10 and each also comes with three handshake cards – these are basically multipliers that must be played before any numbers on a given track. (One handshake takes your score in that color and multiplies it by two; two handshake cards multiply the track by three, etc.)
There’s a fair amount of risk involved because the positive scoring on each track starts at 20 points and you must play the cards in numerical order from low to high. So if you start at expedition with a 5 card, you can never play the 2, 3, or 4 (or a handshake) in that colored set, but if you manage to play the 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 cards you’d score a total of 25 points (5+6+7+8+9+10 – 20 = 25). So you are basically playing and drawing cards each turn, trying to score points in your “expeditions.”
After each round, of which there are three, you simply add up the points for each color and move on to the next round. As you can see, it’s entirely possible, by bad or sometimes simply unlucky play, to score negative points in a color – and this is where the game’s AI shows its penchant for stupidity.
It’s not uncommon for the AI to throw down a 9 card on a track to start an expedition, which guarantees a negative score for that track. You aren’t required to start an expedition in every color but the AI has no qualms with playing a high card with only a few cards left in the deck for no apparent reason.
It’s odd because the AI shows great savvy when taking cards off the discard pile and at times plans things extremely well, then, right when the game is tight it plays a high card, costing itself crucial points. It takes a lot of the luster off of the solo game.
