Looting Atlantis?

We took a crack at Looting Atlantis today, and really could not get into it.  On the box it sounded like  you place lava tokens and grab cards before the city burns down.  In actual practice, putting those 4 cards on every board space took up a lot more room than expected, and then the rules missed a lot of situations.

Even how to place a lava token was not described well.  It was either "on the next space in a lane" or "moving out across city spaces" or you could start a new lava lane.  This could have been described as simply "on a space with a red triangle or next to any space that already has lava on it."

We didn't see the note that for two players, you should place two lava tokens at the start of each turn, then take your two moves.  Or the note that after the lava hits a city space, you take three moves per turn for the rest of the game.

We saw that the cards had special scoring rules and effects written on them, but they were a bit hard to read.  We weren't in the mood to read special powers off of cards today, so we focused on trying to get the best score from our cards.  After a while, I escaped to Egypt for 40 points, and Anne was stuck on the board with more lava being added each turn.  She ended up beating me by about 40 points, so if you bail early, you get to watch your lead disappear.

I found this playthrough after we had wrapped up our game not knowing if we missed the point of it.  The player here was way more into the points than we ever were, and where to move to get the cards he needed.  I liked that the different card types scored in different ways.

It felt imbalanced to me that you can play the cards to get certain effects, but then you no longer have that card for your final score.  Even the video presenter had a hard time making a case for why you would drop points to get those effects.  It felt like it might be much better with more than two players.

We found this one boring.  The lava was supposed to be fun, but in the end there was just a limited range of cards to pick from.  We might give it another try sometime, but more likely it will go into the heap to be donated.