BATTLELORE VS LOST CITIES

BattleLore is a strategy board wargame for two players, created by Richard Borg and initially published by Days of Wonder in 2006 (and later by Fantasy Flight Games). The game is based on the same mechanics as Battle Cry, Memoir '44 and Commands & Colors: Ancients, but has a fantasy and medieval theme. BattleLore debuted at the 2006 Spiel game fair in Essen, Germany and was released worldwide on November 30 of that year. Typical setup for a game is 10–15 minutes. Beginning players can expect a 45-60 minute duration game, but experienced players can usually finish a game in about 30–45 minutes. Each player has a set of quick reference cards to help him keep rules in mind. Experienced players will rarely have to pull out the rulebook for clarification. The scenario book that comes with the basic box is organised as a tutorial sequence that introduces concepts one adventure at a time, making the game very easy to learn. Each adventure in Battlelore is pre-constructed, leaving the work of creating armies to the scenario author. Although with the Call to Arms Expansion (released May 2007) the players have (limited) control on deploying units to any given scenario. The Battlelore website offers an online scenario builder that helps fans create their own adventures. In September 2008 Fantasy Flight Games and Days of Wonder announced that the game would be moving to Fantasy Flight Games, along with all remaining stock. In 2013, a revised version, BattleLore Second Edition, was released by Fantasy Flight Games.

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Lost Cities is a 60-card card game, designed in 1999 by game designer Reiner Knizia and published by several publishers. The objective of the game is to mount profitable expeditions to one or more of the five lost cities (the Himalayas, the Brazilian Rain Forest, the Desert Sands, the Ancient Volcanos and Neptune's Realm). The game was originally intended as a 2-player game, but rule variants have been contributed by fans to allow 1 or 2 further players, causing Reiner Knizia himself to later provide semi-official 4-player rules. Lost Cities is a fast-moving game, with players playing or discarding, and then replacing, a single card each turn. Cards represent progress on one of the five color-coded expeditions. Players must decide, during the course of the game, how many of these expeditions to actually embark upon. Card-play rules are quite straightforward, but because players can only move forward on an expedition (by playing cards which are higher-numbered than those already played), making the right choice in a given game situation can be quite difficult. An expedition that has been started will earn points according to how much progress has been made when the game ends, and after three rounds, the player with the highest total score wins the game. Each expedition that is started but not thoroughly charted incurs a negative point penalty (investment costs). Interaction between players is indirect, in that one cannot directly impact another player's expeditions. However, since players can draw from the common discard piles, they are free to make use of opposing discards. Additionally, since the available cards for a given expedition are finite, progress made by an opponent in a given color can lead to difficulty making progress in that same color. The game's board, while designed to supplement the theme, is optional and consists only of simple marked areas where players place discards. If Lost Cities had four expeditions instead of five, it could be played with a standard deck of playing cards. When doing so, the face cards would represent investment cards, with numbered cards two through ten serving as the expedition progress cards.

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