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...
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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MASTERMIND
Mastermind or Master Mind is a code-breaking game for two players. The modern game with pegs was invented in 1970 by Mordecai Meirowitz, an Israeli po...
Mastermind or Master Mind is a code-breaking game for two players. The modern game with pegs was invented in 1970 by Mordecai Meirowitz, an Israeli postmaster and telecommunications expert.It resembles an earlier pencil and paper game called Bulls and Cows that may date back a century.
The game is based on an older, paper based game called Bulls and Cows. A computer adaptation of it was run in the 1960s on Cambridge University’s Titan computer system, where it was called 'MOO'. This version was written by Frank King. There was also another version for the TSS/8 time sharing system, written by J.S. Felton and finally a version for the Multics system at MIT by Jerrold Grochow.
The modern game with pegs was invented in 1970 by Mordecai Meirowitz, an Israeli postmaster and telecommunications expert. Meirowitz presented the idea to many major toy companies but, after showing it at the Nuremberg International Toy Fair, it was picked up by a plastics company, Invicta Plastics, based near Leicester, UK. Invicta purchased all the rights to the game and the founder, Edward Jones-Fenleigh, refined the game further. It was released in 1971–2.
Since 1971, the rights to Mastermind have been held by Invicta Plastics. (Invicta always named the game Master Mind.) They originally manufactured it themselves, though they have since licensed its manufacture to Hasbro worldwide, with the exception of Pressman Toys and Orda Industries who have the manufacturing rights to the United States and Israel, respectively.
Starting in 1973, the game box featured a photograph of a white man in a white jacket seated in the foreground, with a young Asian woman of high caste standing behind him with the golden symbols of office visible on her sari, denoting the power and intellect behind the throne. The two amateur models (Bill Woodward and Cecilia Fung) reunited in June 2003 to pose for another publicity photo.
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