XBLA Today: Lost Cities

Hey all, it’s Sedington, back again, buckle up Syncr’s and lets begin. On this weeks edition of XBLA Today, we are taking a look at Lost Cities, the award winning two person card game changed up and made into an XBLA game. I have to admit that I was a bit excited to try this one out. I am a fan of the other board games on XBLA, and was hoping for another good one to add to my collection. So how did it go?

First of all, if you are a fan of the other card and board games on XBLA, like Catan, you will probably like Lost Cities. It is a lot faster moving than the other board games, and you will finish rounds of the game fairly quickly. There are 60 cards you play with in the game, and 5 “cities” to explore. The cards represent progress on your expeditions on one of these 5 cities, and the more you get on one city, the more you make. The rules are fairly simple, but making the right choice in the game can be difficult. You can only place cards on cities in an increasing order, such as 2-5-7-10, and the colors of the cards have to match the city.

Follow the jump for more…

When you first lay down a card on a city, you get what are called “investment costs”. When laying down a normal numbered card, it is negative 20, and then you add the number on your card, say a 3, to it to get your initial starting amount for that city. There are however investor cards, which change it entirely. These investor cards can only be laid down before any other type of cards. An expedition’s value is multiplied by its number of investors plus one, up to a maximum of 4 times the value with three investors. So you can really boost your score using investors. But each investor comes with a high risk. Just putting one down first changes your initial investment cost from 20 to 40. So these investor cards can help you as much as hurt you, so place wisely.

With this type of risk involved, you usually don’t try and go for all 5 cities in a round, as making all 5 profitable is a difficult task. It’s usually a good idea to go for 3, but which ones? That part is the real difficulty of the game, where to start. You only have the cards in your hand to tell, and you can only use one at a time. After each turn where you either discard a card, or use it, you have to withdraw a card from the unused deck, or a formerly discarded card. (You can’t however, pick up the card you just discarded). This also presents a problem with discarding cards as you don’t want to discard cards that will help your opponent.

There is online multiplayer modes for 2-4 players, either one on one or two on two, but sadly, no local. This game probably would not work out well local, as the person next to you could see your cards, and the honor system just wouldn’t work out. There is also vision camera support, only for you to be seen though, in the UNO, Spyglass Board Games kind of way.

In the end, Lost Cities seems like a fun, fast paced addition to XBLA’s board gaming genre. With good game mechanics, and quick gameplay, it works well when you only want to game for just a few minutes. If you want to play longer, just bump up the amount of rounds. The gameplay is simple, but there is plenty of room for people to develop complex strategies. In the end, it seems to me to be a welcome addition to XBLA, especially for the board game junkies out there. This has been Sedington86 with this weeks edition of XBLA Today, and see you next week. Same bat-time, same bat-channel.