A round
A turn is two things
Put a card down or throw one away, then take one back. That is the whole turn, every turn.
Cards committed to a site must rise in value, so the order you play them in is decided the moment you start. A stake has to go down before any number does: it doubles what the site pays and doubles what it costs.
Everything you discard is a gift you may not want to give
Whatever you throw away lands face up where the other person can take it, and that is the whole of the interaction between you. Half of playing this well is deciding what is safe to let go of.
The round ends the instant the last card leaves the deck, whoever that suits — which is often not the person still one card from a bonus.
The reckoning, which is where the twenty comes back
Every site you started is worth its cards minus twenty, multiplied by its stakes, plus twenty more if you got eight cards down.
A site you never touched is worth nothing, and that is frequently the best result available. The question is never whether you can play a card; it is whether you meant it.
On the sheet
Questions people ask
Can I play Lost Ruins on my own?
Yes. The other chair holds one of three explorers, and they are three opinions about the same game rather than one opponent at three volumes: the Surveyor will not open a dig she cannot finish, the Chancer opens everything and finds out, and the Keeper watches what you are digging and never hands you anything.
Is it really only for two?
Yes — it is a two-player design and we have not stretched it into something it is not. A third person at the table would be a worse game than the two-player one, so the room seats two and says so.
Does anybody have to install anything to play Lost Ruins?
No. It runs in the browser everyone already has open. One person opens a room, reads out the six-character code or pastes the link into the channel, and everyone else is at the table in a couple of seconds.
Do we need accounts?
No. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address anywhere in the flow. You pick a name when you sit down, and that is the whole of it.
How many people can play Lost Ruins?
1 to 2 — best with two, or one and an explorer. A room seats up to 12.
How long does a game of Lost Ruins take?
About 25 minutes, which is the length of a coffee break rather than the length of a games night. Nobody is the host in the sense of holding the controls, so a round finishes whether or not everyone is still looking at it.
Does it work over a video call?
That is what it is for. The game is on the screen and the talking is on the call — nobody has to describe a board to anybody, and the parts that must stay private stay on the server rather than being read out.
Credit where it is due
Adapted from Lost Cities, designed by Reiner Knizia and published by Kosmos in 1999.