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Lost Cities
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Check out the new multi-player card game from Sierra Online Shanghai.

Xbox Live Arcade has over 100 games available to date, and on April 23 another was added. It's called Lost Cities, and was developed by Sierra Online Shanghai. To purchase it, you'll need to shell out 800 MS Points. Is it worth the cost of admission? Read on to find out.

Lost Cities – XBLA’s newest addition.

Lost Cities for XBLA is a digital version of a card game devised in 1999 by Reiner Knizia. The deck consists of sixty cards, most of them numbered 2-10, with each card being one of five colors. There are also a few bonus cards of each color. Players start with eight cards in their hand.

On the table, there are five color-coded piles in which you can play the cards you have. You play them one at a time, on the pile that matches the color of the card. You play them in ascending order, (like playing cards on the ace piles in solitaire), except that you can skip numbers that you don’t have. For each card that you play on a colored pile, you get points equal to the face value of the card. So if you play a 4, you get four points.

On your turn you play a card, and then draw a card from the deck or a discard pile, so that you always have eight cards in your hand. Then it’s your opponents turn. Play ends when there are no longer any cards in the deck. The player with the most points wins the round. There are 3 rounds per game. If you need further instruction, you can give the tutorial a shot, it’s quite helpful at getting you up and running in a short amount of time.

Match the cards in your hand to the piles on the table.

The game can be played in single-player mode, against one CPU opponent. Or if you have some buddies that also own the game, you can go online and play against up to 3 of them at once. Like all Xbox 360 games, in Lost Cities there are leaderboards for comparing yourself to your peers, as well as achievements to be had. Since it’s an XBLA title, there are 12 of them, totaling 200 gamerscore.

Lost Cities can be played online with up to 3 others.

What’s nice about Lost Cities is that you can learn to play the game in a very short amount of time. There is a bit of strategy involved once you’ve learned all the ways to score and prevent your opponent from scoring. Games go by quickly, which makes it an excellent concept for a downloadable game. The unfortunate thing about the game is that it’s not very deep. Once you have the crux of the game, there’s not a much else to learn.

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