Dave Reviews: Previously Looted Mayan Temples

Lost Cities

I don't know why I always assume games with the 'South American explorer' vibe revolve around Mayans. The Incas were pretty legit.

Fuck the Aztecs, though. Goddamned Eagle Warriors.

Wait, which game are we playing?

Lost Cities is a Reiner Knizia game, which is good! Reiner makes good games! So Lost Cities is... it must be...

Ok, look. This is a 2008 reprint of a 1999 game. Less was expected of the industry back then. It's useful to go back and look at games like this so we see where our hobby came from while also looking towards where it's going.

So.

In Lost Cities, you have five explorers and five tracks for them to go down. Each track has a randomized set of bonuses on certain spaces, and are worth a certain number of points at the end of the round depending on how far your explorer moves. There's also a huge deck of cards, with cards numbered zero through ten and corresponding to the color of one of the tracks. If you want to put an explorer on a track, you play a card of that color. Easy.

However, if you want to move the explorer further along, you have to play a card of the same value or higher. Therefore, in order to move the explorer a decent distance (hopefully all the way to the end), you need to start with low value cards and work your way up as slowly as you can. You can discard a card and draw a new one rather than play a shit card; however, you can't take too long, because as soon as a certain number of total explorers reach the break line on their tracks, the round ends, and explorers who haven't moved very far are actually worth negative points.

The points get kind of stratospheric, which is neat—many games don't go above fifty, and most don't go above one hundred. If you're not getting triple digits in a single Lost Cities round, that wasn't a very good round.

But there's not much strategy here. As the round draws nearer to a close, you may need to decide whether it's worth the risk to start an explorer down a new trail when they could be worth negative points. It can be a consequential choice, but it's about the only intellectual decision you'll need to make. If you can go down a track and you have a low card, you play the card and go down the track. If you can hit bonuses that give you extra moves, you link them together as best you can. Maybe you play a 2 on one track rather than a 0 on another because you like the bonuses on that first track more, but you still have the 0 and you'll still play it pretty soon.

I imagine that people looking for games that weren't Twilight Imperium-sized but more friendly than Monopoly and less mindless than Chutes & Ladders were probably happy with this in 1999. Today, it's quite possibly a good tool for teaching game basics to kids. Beyond that, it's just a casual game that can kill an hour. Don't avoid it like the plague, but it's not much more than a thrift store purchase.

Score: Three Macklemores out of five.