 I'm rim. I'm Scott and this is geek nights tonight rain air canizia's lost cities also known as rim cheats The main bit is this game called lost cities. So lost cities is old old old rain air canizia game that we just Like knew about well, I played it. I knew I had played it in the past with people. I knew this game I knew it was a great two-player game, but rim had never played it And the other people play it. I just kind of ignored it. In fact, I owned it and didn't realize I owned it The other day the other day it's like, hey, let's just play two people games So I go over to the closet. We're looking and I see lost cities in there I'm like, hey, I haven't played lost cities in a couple years. That game's an amazing two-player game Let's play that and rim hadn't played it and he owned it. So we took it out I reread the rules and we played and we've been playing it a whole bunch because you remembered how amazing it was Memory was absolutely correct. It's amazing. I want to point out Scott taught me the game And remember we just did that show we're talking about Wil Wheaton and tabletop how even professionals like us will like mess up I got that tiniest thing wrong. It's a big deal. It is kind of a big deal when teaching me this game So we played otherwise. I was absolutely correct about all the other rules and I didn't miss any other rules Yep, however, you suck at this game. I don't suck. I however cheat I just beat you just now in that one round me in a one round by a few points Meanwhile in every other round and game of this I have crushed you the three we played in a row I mean there isn't a certain amount of luck in this game. Yeah, but I can't always be lucky You can be lucky three out of four times It's not like you're the one shuffling and so lost cities is actually a really really simple game Right. So there is a deck of cards in this deck of cards. There are five. It's really a card game It's like it comes in a box or the board just sort of increase the production value It's just a deck of cards, but the deck of cards has the numbers two through ten and five colors, right? Yellow red white green and blue. Yep, and it has in each color. There are also three handshake cards I don't know what they're actually called. No one cares Investments. Yeah, the theme of the game is you're going on expeditions and You can go venture into the unknown for the daring and adventurous There are many lost cities to find and explore Yeah, there are five different lost cities to search for the red one the yellow one the green one the blue You're missing the great flavor of this game. No one gives a shit search can take you to the Himalaya The white zillion rain forest the green the ever-shifting sands of the deserts the Asian volcanoes And to Neptune's realm the blue Yeah, so Basically, you can you play cards in the different expeditions and for an expedition to pay out and give you points You have to play enough cards for that expedition to get to the successful point, right? If you don't if you start playing cards at an expedition, but you don't play enough to make it successful You lose a bunch of points because you like went out and geared up and went to Neptune's realm And you didn't really find anything there and you just went your ass back home and you just wasted a bunch of money So you lose points the game you don't even try you don't play any cards of a certain color Then it's just a zero. So yeah, so basically think of it this way the game is all about risk management risk aversion and Reading the other player and their discards and managing the deck timer, right? Because basically what you do is you draw card play well you play a card draw card. That's the worst part Yes, you got a place like a battle line. You got to play something Gotta play something and your only option is either to discard in the top of a color in the middle and then The other person on their turn could choose to draw that as their draw Yeah, or play it in one of the piles and now you're locked in that piles gonna score If you ignore a color completely it never scores But if you put even one car down there, you could get up to negative 60 points a lot of negative points. Yeah, it is if you play the wrong things Yeah, so and the other thing so let's say you play down, you know I hand handshakes have to come first if you play one handshake in a column That doubles the score even if it's a negative score, it'll be negative doubled So if you just play one handshake that score is negative 20 negative 40 Right. Yep, but you have to play the handshake first before you play anything else So like if you play the number three and then you draw a handshake the handshakes useless if it's the same color So here are the actual rules the game is really simple You have like a hand of eight both you have any eight the oldest player goes first So I always go first I guess older by like two months and change but older nonetheless The rule is the rules are very explicit We're not gonna mess up the rules and on your turn you either play a card onto one of the colors or you discard a card Into the middle on one of the colors covering up any cards that are already discarded Then you draw a card either from those discards or from the top of the deck and Play continues until someone draws the last card in the deck meaning every card has been drawn You then immediately score and before you do all of this you agree How many rounds you're going to play the game says three is a good number. Yeah I mean the reason you play rounds is because while the game isn't you know super luck-based I mean it's still got some luck involved, right? You could theoretically get some awful draw. That's like unplayable and You end up with no score even though you played as well as you possibly could so you mitigate that by playing a few rounds And then all the luck is washed out in you know The the multi-round to play and you see who's really better at the game now That's pretty straightforward But as Scott said when you're teaching it to me then there's canizia twist because remember this is right here Canizia, you know almond ray battle line Rah Dakers in your brain. Yep through the desert modern art. There's always a canizia twist The twist is for each color the score you get is one like Scott said multiplied by two well, it's multiplied by one plus the number of handshakes you've played mm-hmm and Before you multiply or add your score together You subtract 20 from the total face value of all the cards some so if I play a Four five and a ten that's 19 So that's a negative one on that row and if you get if you had three handshakes, that's Four times negative once a negative four. That's bad Yeah, I think that it's really hard to get to 20 when you've got in the deck cards number two through ten and That's it one of each. Oh mention you have to play the cards on their correct color of course and You must always raise the value of your pile You must always play a higher card than any previous card you've played right? So you play the two and then you play the five you can never play the three or the four ever There's no way to pick up that five or and that's when rim immediately discards the three and four has been holding on to Well, you can't draw him right so it's like on the one hand You know, I could try to hold out to get the three and four. Maybe they're in the deck I don't know rim has them But if I assume he has them Even if I say well, he has them there's no point in holding out for them because I won't get them I'll just play my five that now frees his hand up and he can now finally discard them If I had maybe held out longer He might have been forced to discard them just to do something and give him me a play There is one other rule and this is the rule that Scott forgot if you play eight or more cards in a pile Then after you do all the scoring you get 20 additional points, right? So you can play, you know, if it might be hard to get over 20 if you don't get the big cards Like someone might be holding them out on you I think if you play eight cards, you're guaranteed to be above 20 making it moot. Yeah, you're it's it Well, you could three four what's got what's two plus three plus three handshakes Two three four five six. Yep. That's 11 Yeah, you're gonna get positive points. Yeah It won't be that I won't be a lot though, but it'll be still a great play So with all this combined like the rule makes it very the rules make it very clear and again This is actually an example of really well written rules. Like you just read these things. They're beautiful Your back expedition each one could be worth anywhere between negative 80 and 156 there you go. That's a big swing that's a negative 80 is three handshakes and nothing else and 156 is you play all the cards in order perfectly in the whole set Yep, so we've played this game a bunch I'm pretty much the god wizard of this game at least for now, but It's interesting the interplay like one thing I've noticed that I started trying right away It seems like a pretty powerful strategy is if I think Scott's not going after our color I'll start banking cards by discarding them because you know the round ends when the last card is drawn So I can bank cards into the middle and draw new cards by discarding If I'm confident Scott will not draw those cards from the discard and use them Then later if I get cards of that color No, and that's actually more likely because Scott's not investing in that color Then I can just redraw those as my draws and have guaranteed points Well a good way to stop this strategy if your opponent is using it is oh I see that he has begun redrawing the cards he previously discarded to sort of make a huge play in that color Let me take one of the cards from that perfectly open discard pile so now that they cannot use it Oh, they're still I'll take another one from there. Just hold it in my hand where they can't get it Yes, thank you. Yep, but you could twist that one step further and use that as a stalling tack to get the other person Not finish a bigger pile of something. Mmm. There's a Because it's a two-player symmetric game There is a huge amount of card counting reading the other players plays Bluffing up all that stuff combined. You can take really big risks. Sometimes you get fucked by those risks Yeah, it's like you could just like a lot of times you'll start a hand and in your hand You'll see something like white handshake white to white 10 and you're like, all right This is gonna happen, right? I mean long inside straight I mean, I'm gonna get I just need like one more one or two white cards in the hole Turn one right there are I know for a fact a lot of white cars left in the deck Yep, and all I need to do is see pretty much any two of them And this is it'll be a positive play and I can just make easy plays at the start of the game I can just go white handshake white to so of course what happens is you play white handshake and then rim goes three four six seven Eight and it's like you turn one. How could you possibly know? But it's like that was a somewhat reasonable risk to take and you know what if you they you didn't just get that horrible Luck of yet rim had every white card in his hand You just didn't know it yeah heading into the Himalayas is a horrible risk to take then You would have had you know You could have drawn it like it was possible that the deck was shuffled in such a way that every other card was white And you would have just kept drawing white cards and playing them and played them all in order some majestic Perfect luck right it can happen there is luck But you shuffle in the cards, I mean you can't you can only blame it on luck three out of four times like I can't So this is basically like one of the best two-player tabletop games. I've ever seen So if you need two-player tabletop games, which everyone does get this in battle line Because they're both great and they're both canizia and I guess oh she Sure any name another good to player game played a lot of bad to player games All the other ones ever yeah netrunner is a good to player that runner is a good to player game Yeah, yeah, not that many Yeah, law cities go find out what treasure is lying in them All right, and on that note, we will see you at Connecticut. We got shit to do before the con. Yeah, I got a lot to do I can't sit around This has been geek nights with rim and scott special thanks to DJ pretzel for the opening music cat Lee for web design and brand okay for the logos be sure to visit our website at front row crew dot com For show notes discussion news and more remember geek nights is not one But four different shows sci-tech Mondays gaming Tuesdays anime comic Wednesdays and indiscriminate Thursdays geek nights is distributed under a creative Commons attribution 3.0 license geek nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience But unlike those other late shows it's actually recorded at night