Lost Cities

Sixty cards and a scorepad, that’s the whole game, and the deck’s thin enough that the box could’ve been half its size if the outfitter didn’t insist on padding these things out with air. Five colors, one for each expedition route, cards numbered two through ten plus a few investment cards per color that multiply your score and your risk both. Two players only, which up here is either me and whoever radios in that they’re hiking through, or me against the empty chair, since there’s a solitaire variant in the rules that I’ve used more seasons than not.

Each turn you play a card to start or extend one of your expeditions, or discard it, then draw a replacement from the deck or the top of a discard pile. The catch that makes the whole thing work is you can only play a color going up in number, never down, so once you’ve committed to a expedition with a low card you’re locked into building it in ascending order or abandoning it outright, and abandoning it means every card you’ve already sunk in there counts against you at the end. That’s the real game, deciding early whether a route is worth starting and having the discipline to walk away from a bad one before you’ve spent three turns making it worse. I’ve watched myself lose to my own stubbornness on this more than I’d like to admit, playing both hands solo and still managing to out-stubborn myself.

It’s quiet in the way I like a card game to be quiet. No dice, no combat, just the two decks and the arithmetic sitting there waiting to be done in your head. A round takes maybe twenty minutes once you know it, so it fits into the gaps between smoke checks without either interrupting a check or leaving you staring at the horizon for the last ten minutes wishing you’d started something faster.

The investment cards are the sharpest part of the design. Playing one before you’ve started a color multiplies whatever that expedition ends up scoring, points or losses both, so it’s a bet you make on your own future discipline before you know if you’ll keep it. I like that a game this small has room for a decision that pointed.

Wear on the components has been minimal, the cards are a decent stock and I keep them rubber-banded in a freezer bag against the damp. Knock a point off only because the solitaire variant, while fine, is clearly the game’s second job. It wants a second person across the table, and most weeks up here that person doesn’t show.