Lost Cities

The game randomly switches scores when playing against the AI (the only way I play). So, I cannot play more that one round if I want to make sure the scoring does not get messed up. It appears the developers have no interest in fixing this. No fix = no recommendation.

DO NOT BUY.

The multiplayer is completely broken. Lobby causes crashes and if you're lucky enough and actually get in game despite error messages of blue line server trouble, you'll crash the moment you pass a turn. Tried on different PCs and even from a different account and on different network connection to eliminate that my connection/pc could be the problem. Same result. Literally unplayable, unless you want to enjoy 5% of the game by only playing against dim and dumb AI - that works. But the AI is really stupid and easy to beat (gave me an 8, which I needed to turn my triple wager 24567 column into profit)

Light and fluffy, more in line with a game like Uno or Mille borne. family friendly, a fun romp.

I have played this card game forever. I was very excited when I saw it here. I played against the weak AI. It works fine, but the AI is horribly weak and lacks any strategy.

I played against my friend online and the game keeps glitching and wont work at all. BlueLine Cloud issue of some kind....

Bottom line... buy the old card game. Don't buy this. It is broken and unplayable. If anyone has a fix I would love to play it and will change my review.

Recommended because lost cities is a really great game. However, this rendition of the game is fundamentally flawed as the game does not keep scores properly and the winner is sometimes actually the player who lost. The scores for each round flip randomly between P1 and P2 when tallied for the final score. Soon I'll play online with myself to check if the scores tally correctly or if it is glitched like playing vs ai is.

DO NOT BUY if you plan to try multiplayer. You can be dealt over 10 cards and myself and the person I was playing with kept getting a "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error message. This made the game unplayable. The developers obviously don't care. Don't waste your money.

This is a flat-out terrible game. I hit a major bug in my first play that has apparently been known and unaddressed since 2017, and the AIs are *insultingly* bad--as in, "discarded a 10 on the last play instead of playing it for +20 points"-level bad. It is a highly polished wrapper around a pile of steaming garbage.

This game is simply a masterpiece. It's even better than the board game.

Just crashed on a good hand, but I was thinking of reviewing anyway...

This version of Lost Cities (fortunately bought in a sale) is basically only even half-playable when viewed as a totally solitaire-style experience, but you'll eventually realise that even playing that way the implementation is just too flawed to be ultimately worthwhile.

The big problem is that you just cannot form any kind of game strategy due to the AI being so poor. It's very probably the worst I've ever encountered. The online documentation claims to have different level settings, but that is 100% not the case - there isn't even a 'low' level of AI on display here, just 4 broadly different approaches to play. And who in real life goes hellbent on one approach across all the 3 rounds of Lost Cities? As long as you play reasonably well, all of the AI approaches usually get minus scores for all 3 rounds!

One of the AI 'approaches' will even suddenly discard a 10 for you to grab, when it has say a 6 and a 7 and you have 3,5,8 etc.. As a consequence it is next to impossible to predict what the AI may or may not do, or even worse what cards it might be keeping in its hand, as sometimes it never even plays its high cards the whole game even though it should be scoring well off them. It's not just that it gets stuck with cards (which can happen of course), it's that it does not use proper (ie even semi-decent) AI.

So even played as solitaire it has the fatal flaw of you never being able to work out what cards are likely to be left in the deck. And when you realise that you'll likely uninstall. But I suppose you could have some fun for a while completely shooting the moon trying make 300, until you start to play the cards too quickly and it crashes on you like it did me today.

Rubbish, eh?

PS. There's actually a decent online version out there with very tough AI and access to online players too, but it will cost you money for game points after you play it for a while.

Clever strategy game. Quick, relatively easy to play but not easy to win. One significant issue - you play three rounds against the ai. Often, after the 3rd round, the computer switches the scores - so, if you are winning by 20 points after the second round, when the final score is calculated you are 20 points behind for the first two rounds. Many comments directed at the developer have received no response. It appears the developers have abandoned the game - too bad, an excellent, popular board game with a tarnished pc legacy.

bug in the scoring. gives points to the opposition.

BlueLine Games classics. I don't even know why I let the negative reviews to postpone me buying this game for so long. As they say, easy to understand, hard to master. I liked the rules, the game mechanics, funny achievemnts and pass-to-play multiplayer that is the jem of BlueLine Games, imho. Please, buy it and support my favourite game developer.

I say yes out of hopeful optimism. The operator controls and flow are well done and I've played several games. But I've also had it hang on me when playing remotely with a friend. We played the first of the 3 games and then it hung shortly after starting the second. We aborted and the RESUME worked so we played the second game. It completed so we started the third game and it hung again. After this the RESUME would not work. Every attempt to use it tried to load the game from the server but on both of our systems we would get a pop up window that says "Object reference not set to an instance of an object." We tried 3 times and then gave up. I hope the author of this game will read this and can come up with a fix for I like the game and hope it can be fixed.

I have enjoyed playing the card version of this game and hoped to enjoy it electronically, too. Although there are a number of frustrating elements, the deal breaker is that it keeps swapping points: when it goes to total up the points at the end of the game, it swaps my points with the computer's!

From a just frustration perspective, there are some odd design decisions:
1. card in hand are unsorted (and unsortable as far as I can tell) making it more difficult to easily see what's available
2. why put opponent's cards upside down (as if there was a person sitting there?).
3. haven't figured out a way to look back at the cards after the round has been scored. Would be nice to check them

I was going to encourage friends to buy it so that we could play across distance, but I'm not about to give the company more money after seeing how poorly this was done.

Lost Cities is a great card game... this program is not. Would not recommend until these issues have been patched.


Bugs: Joe's Apartment |== | That's some high-quality code
Graphics: I'm gonna barf |== | I'm in love
Sound: Better turn it off |=== | "This was a triumph..."
Fun: I'd rather do the dishes |=== | Just one... more... turn...

Overall: Waste of money |== | Buy this game. A-S-A-P.

Legend:
= Horrible
== Bad
=== Meh
==== Good
===== Awesome!



Just like the boardgame, EXCEPT THAT SCOREKEEPING IS BROKEN in the Mac version. Alas, it's a fatal flaw -- it gives you the same score every time, no matter what your actual score is! It's pretty weird that this major bug escaped their notice. Obviously it makes the game unplayable. That's a pity, because the mechanics are good.

Really good game and great to play with friends, but it still has a lot of issues the developer needs to fix.

1. I have played with a friend and won all three games, and had highest overall score, yet he got the win in his stats.
2. The game often glitches and I end up with 9 or 10 cards in my hand.
3. We have had games where in our stats, we both got the win, even though clearly one of us had lost by a large margin.
4. Local multiplayer doesn't work, and instead requires both people to be using the same PC, which is just the same as pass and play.
5. When playing the bots, the scores seem to 'swap'. So for example, I won game 1 with a score of +30, and the bot had -4. After game 2, the scores had switches, so the bot had +30 for game 1, and I had the score of -4.

The list of issues I keep finding are piling up. These all seem like basic things that should have been noted in testing. I have unfortunately had to change my recommendation to not recommended, because of them.
If these can be fixed, I would highly recommend this game.

Good game play implementation but the AI is super weak. I certainly hope they have plans to upgrade the AI soon otherwise people will get bored fast.

Yes, I enjoyed this. Plays just like the card Game, The AI makes a few strange moves and although I have not played all the different ones available I have won the game by a rather large margin. Think the AI needs to be a bit stonger.
Not many playing Online at the moment and so there is no-one around to give a challenging game.
Hopefully this should improve as more people purchase the game.
So, Yes, very good but needs to be bit tougher in order to make the game really exciting.

Update. Seem to be having problems playing an online game. Message read "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" and then the game crashes. Pity really because I was looking for some good online players. Obviously needs a little more work to fix this bug.

Plays just like the card game. Only negative thing is if you are playing hot seat there is no way to NOT see your opponents hand. It also doesn't allow you to change the other card holder to a different ID so in effect for names you are playing yourself.

Fix that and i'd be happy to give it a thumbs up.