Playing Lost Cities with Lost Cities: Rivals

General
1

I’d bought a set of Lost Cities: Rivals knowing that you could play the original Lost Cities with the set. If you haven’t played either, Lost Cities is a 2 player classic (currently ranked #310 overall on BGG), and Rivals expands it a bit to allow 4 player games.

I wrote down instructions to myself for future games with 2 players, putting them here in case they’re helpful to others:

  1. Give the starting player card to Player 1
  2. For every color, remove the extra 2, 3,4,5 expedition cards. Mark these with a dot. You should be left with exactly copy of cards from 2-9 in 5 colors totaling 45 expedition cards.
  3. You don’t get starting wager cards in Lost Cities (these are the ones with the dark background). Remove these (2 per color) and mark all with a dot.
  4. Use 5 starting wager cards that you just marked (1 for each color) as your starting board. Put them between the two players in horizontal orientation. It should look like this:
    Player 1
[    ] [     ] [      ] [     ] [    ] 
    Player 2
  1. Shuffle the remaining cards (60 total cards = 45 expedition + 15 wager) and follow the original lost city rules (8 cards per player). Give the starting player card to the player who goes first.

The gold coins are unused, since there is no auction mechanism.

The next time you’re playing, you can quickly do the following:

  1. Remove all cards with dots.
  2. From the above cards, pick 5 wager cards to make your board. Note that “board” is really an optional placeholder, and not really needed (kinda like Hanabi)
  3. Play the game as usual with the remaining cards. You should have 60 cards (12 per color - 3 wager and 9 expedition cards from 2-9).
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Bonus: Once you’ve the 60 cards separated, they make for a nice travel pack, so you can play it on the go when you next travel when you visit your friends when the apocalypse ends.

3

Shouldn’t that be extra 2, 3, 4 and 5?

1 Like
4

Put in a correction, thanks.