Game Review: Lost Cities: The Board Game / Keltis

 

By W. Eric Martin
February 10, 2009

Designer: Reiner Knizia
Publisher: Rio Grande Games / Kosmos / Filosofia Games
Players: 2-4
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 30-60 minutes
Rules Language: English / German / French

It’s impossible to read ["Have You Seen...?"] from cover to cover without being convinced that Hollywood's greatest achievements are not the monotonously important dramas that so often sucker in Academy voters but the stylish, highly polished entertainments, largely comedies, that endure even though they weren’t made to be lasting.

- ”From Benjamin Schwarz’ review of David Thomson's “Have You Seen...?” in The Atlantic, November 2008

As I detailed in one of my BGN columns, Lost Cities: The Board Game and Keltis are near identical twins, with the games sharing 95% of the same DNA and differing only in their outlook toward life, with Keltis being the chummy uncle who offers advice and pocket money for your weekend getaway while LC:TBG is the disciplinarian father who’s eager to teach you that life is long and filled with suffering.

Both games originate from Reiner Knizia’s Lost Cities, a card game first published in German in 1999 by Kosmos and later released by numerous publishers, such as the English-language edition from Rio Grande Games. Lost Cities is themed as a game of exploration, with players trying to lay down numbered cards on five colored expeditions in ascending order. The artwork on each of the five suits of cards depicts the path toward an archaeological find, with the highest valued card showing the treasure awaiting at the end of the path.

In addition to the appealing (yet superfluous) visuals, a player’s score in Lost Cities mimics the success or failure of an expedition in the real world. As soon as you start an expedition by playing one card, you’re down 20 points, which represents the cost of the outing. If you play only low-valued cards, their positive points won’t erase that cost, leaving you with a negative score that’s akin to bad press for traveling a road to nowhere; if you lay down a long trail of cards on the same path, especially the ones valued 8-10, you’ll cover that initial cost and end up in the black. Investment opportunities are available in each expedition, allowing you to double, triple or quadruple your bet, in addition to earning a bonus for forging a long trail. (Chris Farrell presents a different argument for the thematic connection of Lost Cities on his “Illuminating Games” blog.)

Lost Cities: The Board Game is Knizia’s attempt to create a version of Lost Cities that accommodates up to four players - Keltis was born when Kosmos wanted to make that design more abstract looking for its game line - and the card play in the board game remains the same as in the original: Players lay down cards in ascending order to move down paths, but with the movement now being tracked by meeples on a path instead of by the cards themselves. A player's score is no longer based on the sum of the cards she's played; instead each space on an expedition’s path is worth points, starting with -20 as in the card game and progressing to a maximum of 50. Special tiles lay beside the paths, granting players additional points, artifacts worth an endgame bonus, and the ability to move any meeple ahead one space. As in Lost Cities, the game lasts three rounds, giving players a chance to recover from a poor showing in one round - or fall further behind, of course.

The game ends either when the card deck runs out (as in Lost Cities) or when five meeples have crossed certain thresholds on the paths. The variability of this timing, combined with the random distribution of special tiles, creates a lot of variety in how the rounds play out. The number of players also affects this timing as with four players you’ll have fewer turns before the deck empties, which consequently means fewer opportunities for advancement; thirty cards are randomly removed from the deck when playing with two players, both to advance the game clock and to simulate the cards claimed by a third or fourth player.

The Game as a Game

A player’s success in Lost Cities depends on her ability to assess risk, read the opponent’s hand, gauge probability, and use the timing of the game to her advantage - skills that are easy to divorce from the theme and view solely in gaming terms. While Lost Cities: The Board Game can be imagined as a ludic representation of archaeological expeditions, it can alternatively be seen solely as a gaming object, as something that can’t exist outside of the world of games. Movement of your figures on the paths doesn’t represent anything; the playing of card is just that and nothing more. The game, by definition, is nothing more than a system of rules that tell people how to interact and the components needed to do so.

For many people, this abstractness will be the game’s failing. It will seem bland and mechanistic, the choices few and obvious. I’ve played the game more than two dozen times across its dual incarnations, and many first-timers have shrugged afterward and dismissed the game with an “It’s okay.” I’ve learned from experience, however, that Knizia designs - as with most games - benefit from repeated exposure. A player focusing on how to play will be at a loss for how to play well. That first-time player will focus on his cards and circle of play and ignore those of the other players. Only with time and repeated exposure can he get a sense for the pace of the game, for how the probabilities play out, for whether a risky play in an expedition is likely to pay off, for how the random arrangement of the special tiles affects the flow of game play, for how to set himself up to end the round when it seems opportune to do so.

These decisions aren’t complex; as with Lost Cities, you will have many turns in which you know exactly what you’re going to do no matter what opponents do. The cards, in some sense, will play themselves - yet you will have decisions to make, situations in which no single answer is correct:

• Do you want to advance on a path and threaten to swipe an artifact from an opponent, possibly forcing him to play cards before he’s ready to do so?
• Do you want to concentrate on particular paths at the risk of discarding cards an opponent can use to fuel his expeditions?
• How long do you want to wait for low numbers before starting a path on which other players are advancing?
• Is it too late to start a new expedition?
• At what point do you commit your large meeple, which doubles a path’s points, to the gameboard?

You might not see those decisions, or you might feel they’re small and not worth considering, but they’re present and incorporated into a smooth and compact gaming challenge that has this reviewer and a fellow player bringing the game out several times daily.

Separate But Equal?

So given their similar origins, what differentiates Keltis and Lost Cities: The Board Game? In the former, the game lasts one round, and players can play cards in ascending or descending order; in the latter, the game sticks to the Lost Cities formula of three rounds and strictly ascending card play, as Knizia intended when he designed the board game. (LC:TBG does include variant rules that transform the game into Keltis should you be inclined to do so.)

Strange as it might seem for changes so minor, they do create different gaming experiences. Keltis is naturally more forgiving, allowing a player who’s dealt a hand of cards valued 7-10 to escape from being pinched into playing a card she doesn’t want to, that is, from starting down a path that she knows is foreshortened and barely worth entering. She can instead start an expedition with a 10 and trek downward, now looking for low-valued cards and possibly benefitting from cards that others will throw away. As with Lost Cities, sometimes you discard one card - despite knowing that an opponent will pick it up and play it - in order to be able to safely discard other numbers of the same color later, but with more than one opponent and play in both directions, that maneuver can be tougher to perform in Keltis.

Ascending and descending play, despite making the game easier in one regard, makes it tougher in another as players will sometimes have more decisions to make rather than fewer. For example, if I’m holding a 2, 3 and 10 of a color, do I start at the far of the color by playing the 10 - thereby not wasting any potential 0s and 1s I later draw in that color, but entombing two cards in my hand for who knows how long - or do I play the 2 and 3 to move farther down the path and have two turns of guaranteed plays instead of one? The answer will depend on what others have played and which special tiles might be within reach on that color, but as with most other choices you’ll ponder in this game, the right answer won’t be made clear until you dig deeper into the deck - by which time it’s too late to reverse your decision anyway. All you can do is make educated guesses and carry on, spotting where you can improve your game in the future.

The ascending card play in LC:TBG mirrors that of its ancestor and consequently all the hand management issues of the older game are present in the new one, with the added twist that you can make safe discards less frequently with three and four players. With two players, both players enter all five expeditions almost every round because the game usually lasts long enough that you can manage to move all the meeples to positive points, especially if you spend the special tiles to get out of the hole rather than push someone toward the big points. With three and four players, everyone tends not to enter a color or two, which leaves you wondering whether an opponent is merely holding back on entering a color or staying clear altogether - in other words, can you discard safely, or is he sandbagging you in hopes of netting another card to play later?

Neither option of card play - ascending and descending, or ascending only - is clearly better than the other. The Keltis option of going both ways does seem like a better choice for families and casual gamers as it causes less pain and lets players keep moving forward, one way or another. Both card play options work fine and create interesting game play situations; the real drawback of having two ways to lay down cards is that players may differ on how they want to play, and nailing down one game option from many - as with open or closed holdings in Acquire, or the various hand refill methods in Elfenland - distances you from the game play, forcing you to argue over how to play rather than getting down to it.

Since your artifact holdings are the only thing that carries over from round to round, playing three rounds in LC:TBG might seem odd. You’re starting fresh, after all, so what’s the point? What I find is that people play somewhat differently depending on how they’re doing within the game. A player behind in the overall scoring will make riskier card plays, or gamble on starting an expedition late in the round rather than ditch iffy cards. In this way the game resembles a hockey match or football game in how players shoot for the big play as the final period nears an end. The single round game of Keltis works, but I prefer the rise-and-fall of a player’s fortunes over multiple rounds.

One final issue involves game aesthetics, and in this category both games rate poorly. Keltis projects a radioactive green from its box, while Lost Cities: The Board Game looks cruder than its parent, with illustrated cards that don’t approach the detail and exploratory feel of the artwork on the original cards. The smooth cards in LC:TBG have started to feel gummy, and while the wooden meeples are pleasingly stackable, the jarringly abrupt landscapes on the gameboard resemble a craft project in which you drop paint in the middle of a plate or cloth, then spin it to spread out the colors. Some players have complimented the board for its bright colors, mind you, so perhaps my taste runs counter to the crowd.

Award Winning?

Many people are appalled that Keltis is the title for which Knizia won Spiel des Jahres, viewing it as a reward for mediocrity. What they’re missing is that for some people the game is a lot of fun. No, it’s not complicated and deep like Taj Mahal or Amun-Re - two titles for which Knizia received a SdJ recommendation - but it doesn’t have to be when the design works as well as it does.

For me, the excitement of Lost Cities: The Board Game doesn’t originate in deep or gut-wrenching choices - although I do feel like I’m still learning how to play better. No, the excitement of LC:TBG comes from seeing your opponent’s face crumble after he draws a card that became obsolete for him that same turn, from snatching an artifact by advancing down a secondary path and earning the right to move an additional figure, from holding off on playing to an expedition and having that gamble pay off by receiving the cards you hoped for. In that sense, the game is like Cribbage or Qwirkle or some other game with easy rules and medium levels of randomness. The joy of the game comes from interacting with my fellow players - ideally beating them! - and the simplicity of the game facilitates that interaction, while at the same time challenging me to play well and not be swept away by the randomness of the card deck.