Lost Cities Tutorial

Theme

In Lost Cities you are an explorer trying to fund expeditions to cities that people have misplaced. There are five expeditions that you can launch, each of which could yield valuable findings, or prove a financial disaster. With the right backing and a little luck you could become more successful than the other player, but can you make the right choices at the right times?

Gameplay

The deck consists of 60 cards, 12 cards in each of 5 suites. Each suite has 9 numbered expedition cards from 2-10 and 3 funding cards.

When the game starts the deck is shuffled and each player is dealt 8 cards. A player is chosen at random to start the first round, the starting player alternates each subsequent round.

The first row of cards show the other player's expeditions. The row below that shows the deck (showing 44 cards remaining) and the discard piles. The next row shows the player's expeditions. The final row of eight cards shows the player's hand. The player must choose a card from their hand.

They must then choose whether to play the card and launch an expedition, or discard the card and hope for a better replacement.

Finally the player must pick up a replacement card from the deck, and play moves on to the other player.

Scoring

When you start an expedition (by playing any card of that suite) you incur a cost of 20 points. You will earn the value of any card you place on the expedition, so if you start an expedition with a 2 card you will have earnt -20 + 2 = -18 points.

After you have started an expedition you can make further progress by playing higher value cards. You can never go backwards, so if you play a 4 on an expedition you can never add the 2 or the 3 to that expedition.

Before you start exploring you may wish to raise some funding by playing a funding card ($) for that suite. This doubles your score for the expedition, including the starting cost. This means that starting with a funding card immediately incurs a cost of 40 points (-20 points for starting the expedition, doubled because of the funding). Additional funding cards may be played before you set out on your adventure, to either triple or quadruple your score.

Additionally there is a bonus for mounting very long expeditions, if you play 8 or more cards (including funding cards) on a suite that expedition earns you an extra 20 bonus points (which is not subject to any funding multipliers). If for instance you had played all 3 funding cards, and the 2, 3, 4, 7 and 10 cards your expedition would be worth -20 point for starting, plus 26 points for the discoveries, for a subtotal of 6 points. The funding cards quadruple this to make 24 points, and having 8 or more cards gives a 20 point bonus for a grand total of 44 points

Discards

If you do not wish to play any of the cards in your hand you may also discard one of them. This card is placed on top of the appropriate discard pile. When a player chooses their replacement card they may either take the top card from the deck, or the top card from any discard pile (you may not however discard a card and then pick it up again in the same turn). You must be careful what you discard as it might be very valuable to the other player.

End of game

The round ends when the last card is taken from the deck, and the game ends when the last round has finished. The winner is the player with the highest total score for all the rounds.