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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SANTORINI
Santorini is an abstract strategy board game for 2-4 players designed and released in 2004 by Gordon Hamilton and republished via Kickstarter in 2016...
Santorini is an abstract strategy board game for 2-4 players designed and released in 2004 by Gordon Hamilton and republished via Kickstarter in 2016 by Roxley Games. Inspired by the architecture of cliffside villages on Santorini Island in Greece, and primarily designed for two players, the game is played on a grid where each turn players build a town by placing building pieces up to three levels high. To win the game, players must move one of their two characters to the third level of the town.
Each turn of play involves moving one of your two pieces around a 5-by-5 grid each turn and then placing a tile adjacent to the moved piece, building up that spot of the board. On subsequent turns, pieces may be moved onto one of these built-up tiles, but only one level up at a time. Pieces may also be moved down any number of levels. Players may also place a special dome tile on top of a three-level building, which prevents a player from moving onto that spot for the remainder of the game.
The primary winning condition is to get one of your pieces onto the third level, though players may also win if their opponent is unable to make a move.
The Roxley Games version of Santorini introduced a god powers variant, which gives each player a unique way to break the rules.
After being directly released and sold by Hamilton in 2004, Roxley Games ran a Kickstarter campaign during March-April 2016, drawing over 7,100 backers and raising over C$700,000, the most successful Kickstarter campaign ever based in Alberta. While the original release used plain white blocks as components, the Roxley version featured an enhanced cartoon-like look to the game, which Hamilton credits for success of the Kickstarter campaign. The game was released in retail outlets in January 2017.
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