Lost Cities

Lost Cities is a great two-player card game that has entertained my wife and I for over ten years.

There are five suits, each with a different exploration theme. Each suit has three investment "handshake" cards and cards from two to ten. Each player has a hand that they must play a card from and then must pick up a card.

Where they play it and where they pick it up from is what makes the game really fun. They can either play it on their side of the board, on the corresponding suit area, or on the board itself. Cards on the board are free for anyone to pick up, therefore when you pick up you can do so from the deck or the board. You can never pick up a card once you have played it on your side of the board. Players alternate playing until the deck has been exausted.

Two things of note. Cards have to be played so that they increase, never decrease. Handshake cards have to be played first and once a numbered card is played you cannot play a handshake card.

Scoring is done by adding all the card values and multiplying the result by one plus the number of handshake cards. One caveat though and its a doozy...if you play a card on your side of the board the score starts at minus 20! Therefore if you have twenty points of cards in a suit then that suit counts as zero, like the below example.

In the example below, having the nine gets you nine points (29 minus 20 is 9).

Having the handshake added gets you 38 points (29 times 2 minus 20)!

Therefore you can have a low score in a suit of minus 80 to a positive score of two hundred and sixteen. You also get a bonus twenty points for having eight or more cards in a suit.

You play three games and whomever has the highest score is the winner.