Lost Cities

A lot of you probably have a confession just like mine: Xbox Live Arcade has made me enjoy card and board games for the first time since my childhood bouts of D&D and Car Wars. In meatspace, all the fussing about with rules and pieces is just too much bother anymore. But when the 360 automates it all for you, it’s amazing how much remarkable gameplay you can mine from Catan, Carcassonne, and now Lost Cities.

At first, Lost Cities feels like overcomplicated Solitaire, but with even one game under your belt, its enjoyably vast depths reveal themselves. You stack five colored decks (called “expeditions”) from the lowest-number card (2) to the highest (10). You can skip from, say, 3 to 7, but you miss out on the chance to earn points for those intervening cards, which you might collect by drawing from the deck or picking over your opponent’s discards.

The catch is that starting an expedition has a cost, so you have to be reasonably sure that you can recoup the expense — having the 8, 9, and 10 of one color would be a fantastic way to be sure of that. Before you start playing the numbered cards, you can also choose to play investment cards, which dramatically jack up the cost of starting an expedition, but they also multiply the payoff for playing the numbered cards.

If it sounds complicated, it isn’t — you’ll grasp the basics after a few hands. What takes time to master are the intricacies. There’s endless risk calculation: overcommitting on investment cards can lose you the game, hastily played cards can bite you in the ass, and you have to think endgame from the start. Your trash can be your opponent’s treasure, or it can free you for victory. However it goes, the game is one long rush that comes from plotting against a worthy adversary. Lost Cities absolutely nails the right combo of gambling and card-counting skill and counts as Live Arcade’s latest gem.