Hello, fellow board gamers. It's yingying.
Picture a yellow 5 in Lost Cities. It's been in your hand for several turns while you decide whether to start the desert expedition. Then you draw the yellow 8, decide time is short, and put it down first. Later, the player across from you lays down a yellow card too. It's a 3. The two routes face each other across the board. You pull the yellow 5 out of your hand to discard it, see that 3, and slide it back where it was.
The card hasn't changed. It still shows the same desert and the same number. There's no legal place for it in front of you anymore, but it could still fit in the column across the board. Nothing on the table says “too late.” Put the two sides next to each other, though, and those words become very easy to read.
When I wrote about Lost Cities before, I focused on how a twenty-point cost makes you hesitate before starting an expedition. This time I'm looking at what comes after. Why do the cards seem to travel toward the same place while leaving two completely different records of time? I'm looking at the five-color, two-player KOSMOS edition. The turn in the opening is an imagined scene for looking closely at the design.
I. How Does One Color Become Two Routes?
1. The Line Across the Middle of the Table
Five spaces on the board give five colors somewhere to go when discarded. The board sits between the two players, and each expedition grows outward on its owner's side. There's something lovely about that arrangement. The little board does enough to give both sides a starting point. As soon as the first yellow card lands, you can see whose it is. When the other player starts yellow, they don't have to find a new place to explain what it is.
I like to think of the table as an open booklet. The shared board is the binding, and the two players write a page each along the same line. Follow yellow from one side to the other and you can start comparing without identifying the color again. Some colors have cards on one side only. Others grow in both directions. The symmetry gives the players a common reference. Each of them writes a different length of story.
2. The Same Landscape, Different Verbs
Yellow tells you you're going to the desert. Look at where the card is to learn what it can do now. On your side, it's a step you've already taken. On the board, it's a discard either player might take from the top of the pile. Yellow connects three places, and position keeps the three apart. The illustration doesn't need another mark to tell you who owns a card. The table is already telling you.
Imagine moving both players' expeditions into the middle and marking ownership in each card's corner. You could still tell them apart. But you'd have to find the mark before comparing how far each player had gone. As it stands, the side of the board tells your eyes and your hands where the column is. When I design an image, I tend to ask whether each symbol is clear enough. Lost Cities makes me ask another question. Can position already say this?
II. Why Leave No Gap for the 5?
1. Numbers Can Skip While the Paper Stays Together
Each color has expedition cards from 2 through 10. The numbers in a column must rise, and cards can only go at the end. You can jump from 3 straight to 8. The cards still overlap, with no printed spaces between them for 4, 5, 6, or 7. The picture looks continuous, but the numbers make your eye pause. Where is the part of the route you didn't take? It's between those two numbers.
Print a nine-space track for each color and a skipped number would leave a physical gap. That might be good for reviewing the game. You could count the cards you missed at a glance. At the beginning, though, you'd see a whole row of spaces waiting to be filled. Here the column starts growing with the first card actually played, and skipping numbers doesn't stop it from growing. Players read the gap without giving up an inch of real table. To me, that feels more like traveling than laying out an entire route in advance. You start walking and only later realize there are places you never went.
2. The Paper Overlaps, and the Order Remains
The official rules say to overlap the expedition cards so the numbers stay clear. From a distance, the latest card sits at the end of the column. Most of the earlier pictures recede, but along the edge you can still count the numbers one by one. The easiest question at the table is where you've got to. Look again and you can see how you got there. Both readings are there in the same column of paper.
For example, two expeditions might both end at 8. One could be 3, 8, and another in a different color could be 2, 4, 6, 8. The last number is the same. Both columns have passed over plenty of choices. But they are different lengths, and the visible numbers tell you they've brought back different things. Writing only the final 8 on a board would be enough to check whether the next card is legal. You'd lose the earlier entries when it came time to score. Spread out every card and you can enjoy every picture, but once all five columns get longer, your eyes have to keep crossing the illustrations. Overlap leaves the full picture where you just arrived and lets the earlier steps trail behind it more lightly.
III. Why Does the Little Stack in the Middle Show Only One Card?
1. Two Ways to Overlap, Two Things to Say
Look at the discards. The rules have you stack each color squarely so only the top card shows. You can draw the top card of a shared discard pile, but you can't take back the card you just discarded that turn. The expeditions on either side show the history you've made, so they keep every number in sight. The stack in the middle shows which card you can take right now, so it leaves one face visible. Both gestures cover one piece of paper with another, and the table uses them for very different things.
Back to the yellow 5. If you finally discard it into the yellow pile, its whole face appears between the two players. Your opponent doesn't need to remember how many cards were there before. One glance tells them there's a card that fits after their 3. If someone later covers it with another yellow card, the 5 is out of reach until it becomes the top card again. Its number stays the same. Whether you can reach out and take it depends on whether another card covers it.
2. There Are Times When the Table Can't Tell You Everything
I like that the little board doesn't list every discarded card like a ledger. Someone who saw the 5 get covered remembers it's underneath. Someone who looks a little later sees only the new top card. Even if both remember, knowing it's there can't substitute for taking the top card away. The visible surface gives you a choice now. To reach anything deeper, you have to wait for an actual change.
In this edition, the round ends when someone draws the last card from the draw pile. A player can also end their turn by taking a discard, so you can't read the thickness of the draw pile as an exact number of plays left. Near the end, both players will be looking back and forth between that little stack and the ends of their columns. One tells you the end is coming. The other tells you which doors are already shut. Both have something to say about time. Put them in two objects, and time has two different shapes.
IV. What Is Worth Another Look Before Packing Up?
1. The Length of the Picture and the Score Can Disagree
Suppose you play only 8 and 10 on your yellow expedition. Two big numbers have landed, and the last card looks like a long way along in a photograph. With no wager cards and no bonus for eight cards, the result is still 18 minus 20, or negative 2. Another route might build up slowly from low numbers and gather more points across several cards without reaching 10. The picture first gives you a sense of how far you've gone. Scoring makes you turn back and see how much you picked up along the way.
I like that mismatch. If a larger number always meant a better ending, you'd only need to look at the last card in a column. Here there's a reason to read the old cards that show only a sliver. A 2 might not stand out on its own the way an endpoint does, but in that route it can be evidence of an early decision to set out. Overlap fits events of different sizes into one narrow strip. When your hand stops moving, you have a chance to see which step was the beginning, which one was a leap, and where the route stopped for good.
2. I Want to Draw a Landscape Players Can Write Into
If I redrew this deck, I'd first spread out the art to enjoy it, then overlap the cards the way they lie during play. I'd work on that narrow exposed edge. Can you read the number? Is there enough color to connect the card to its place in the middle? Can a little landscape still peek out and remind you this is an expedition? If I put the main subject of every illustration in that same strip, the cards might get loud once they overlap. Leave some details for the moment when a single card is lifted, and the end of the column can have a bright spot of its own.
What makes the yellow 5 at the beginning so hard for me to give up might be that it hasn't been written into either page. You could discard it, or let it sit in your hand until the end. As you pack up, there might still be a 3 on the other side. That's when you see that the thing you most want to talk about is a card that never came down. I want to make pictures that have room for that kind of story. There is a landscape already drawn, and an order the players get to write in with their own hands. When they gather up their cards, both players might remember the same number and have different things to say about it.
A question for the table before I go. If you redrew the exposed strip on the overlapping cards in Lost Cities, would you give it only the numbers, or leave a little scenery that could join up into a journey? Which two adjacent cards would you most want to look back at at the end, and how would you want the jump between them to be visible? I'd love to hear in the comments.