Gameplay

Cascadia is a world-building game, or more specifically, a Pacific Northwest (otherwise known as Cascadia) environment-building game. With prairies, wetlands, rivers, forests, and mountains, plus bears, elk, salmon, hawks, and foxes, each player builds their own landscape to score points.

The game comes with a lot of pieces, and while it might take a few minutes to read and understand the instructions, gameplay is fairly simple and the game itself is visually stunning. Here’s what you’re working with:

• 85 Habitat Tiles, including 25 Keystone Tiles
  • Habitat Tiles have one or more of the five different habitats (prairies, wetlands, rivers, forests, and mountains) featured on the hexagon-shaped tile. The tiles that only have one habitat illustrated are called Keystone Tiles
• 5 Starter Habitat Tiles
  • These are three Habitat Tiles permanently stuck together. Each player starts out with one of these to build their landscape off of
• 100 Wildlife Tokens
  • 20 of each different animal: salmon, elk, bear, hawk, and fox
• 25 Nature Tokens
  • Pinecones that can be spent on a turn to change the rules
• 21 Wildlife Scoring Cards
  • One cool aspect of this game is that you can change up the different ways to earn points with the different iterations of Wildlife Scoring Cards. There’s four per each type of animal, plus one Family/Intermediate card
• 1 Scorepad
• 1 Cloth Bag

Set Up

• Add all the Wildlife Tokens to the Cloth Bag and shake it up
• Based on the number of people playing, select the correct number of Habitat Tiles to include in the game (20 per player, plus 3). Shuffle these up and place them in stacks within reach of each player
• Distribute one Starter Habitat Tile to each player
• Place 4 Habitat Tiles (from the stacks) face up and within reach of each player. Next to each of these, place one Wildlife Token randomly selected from the bag
• Place the Nature Tokens within reach of all the players

Essentially, the game consists of players taking turns drafting Habitat Tiles and Wildlife Tokens and incorporating them into their environment, which, at the end, will be scored. The game ends when there are no more Habitat Tiles to replace the one selected by a player during their turn.

On Your Turn

• At the beginning of your turn, you must select one Habitat Tile + Wildlife Token grouping to incorporate into your environment. You must select an existing grouping, unless you want to use a Nature Token.
  • If you have a Nature Token, you can either:
    • Take any one of the four Habitat Tiles and any one of the four Wildlife Tokens
    • Wipe any number of Wildlife Tokens and replace them with different tokens from the Cloth Bag
  • Align at least one side of the Habitat Token you selected with a matching side on your Starter Habitat Tile. Each Habitat Tile has a graphic of the animals that might be in that environment, and you may place the Nature Token on any Habitat Tile that features that animal
  • Replace the Habitat Tile you selected with another one from the stacks, and replace the Nature Token you selected with another one from the Cloth Bag

Things To Note

• Before each turn, take note if there’s a situation of overpopulation. If there are four of the same Wildlife Tokens paired up with the four Habitat Tiles, you must take all four and put them back in the Cloth Bag and replace them with new ones. If there are three of the same Wildlife Tokens, the player whose turn it is may choose to wipe those three and replace them with new ones
• On the Keystone Tiles, there’s a small white pinecone illustration. If you place a Wildlife Token on a Keystone Tile, you earn a Nature Token, to be spent at your leisure

Scoring

• Once there are no Habitat Tiles left in the stacks to replace the one selected by the previous player, the game ends, and it’s time to score your environment.
• At the beginning of the game, players must agree on which Wildlife Scoring Cards to use. While you don’t have to adhere to this grouping, there’s a letter A, B, C, and D card for each of the animals, with A being the easiest and D being the most difficult.
• You earn points four different ways:
  • Wildlife Scoring Cards
    • Each card will show you the different ways you can earn points. For example, the A-level card for Elk calls for straight lines of elk. If you have one elk, you get 2 points. If you have two elk next to one another in a straight line, you get 5 points, and so on.
  • Habitat Tile Corridors
    • You score one point per Habitat tile in your longest contiguous habitat corridor (which is a group of connected habitat type) in each of the 5 habitats. For example, if you have a grouping of 3 rivers and a grouping of 4 rivers, you would earn 4 points because that’s the largest contiguous habitat grouping
  • Habitat Tile Corridor Majorities
    • Depending on the amount of players, you score bonus points in each category of habitat for having the largest contiguous habitat corridor. For example, if player A has 5 rivers and player B has 6, player B earns 2 bonus points
  • Nature Tokens
    • Any Nature Tokens you have left over count for 1 point
  • After tallying up all these points on the Scorepad, the player with the most points wins!

History

Cascadia was designed by Randy Flynn, illustrated by Beth Sobel, and published by Flatout Games. Of course, there’s a whole team behind the creation of this game, and nearly all of them call the Pacific Northwest home.

The Pacific Northwest, or Cascadia, refers to the region in western North American with the Pacific Ocean on the west and the Rocky Mountains to the east. There’s no official boundary including or excluding certain states, but it’s generally accepted that the Cascadia region encapsulates the Canadian province of British Columbia and the Yukon Territory plus the U.S. states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

Flatout Games is a board game design collaborative founded in 2017 by Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, and Shawn Stankewich.

Variations

Flatout Games has published a number of iterations of Cascadia, including Cascadia Landmarks, Cascadia Rolling Rivers, Cascadia Rolling Hills, and Cascadia Junior.

Additionally, within the original Cascadia, there’s instructions for solo play, so on the days when you can’t convince friends and family to settle in for a good board game, you can still play on your own!

Also included in the original Cascadia are different Variants: the Family Variant and the Intermediate Variant. The Family Variant has the same rules as the classic game play, but instead of five different Wildlife Scoring Cards, you use only the Family Variant Wildlife Scoring Card. The Intermediate Variant is similar, it plays the same way as the Family Variant, but with different scoring for different sized groups.

Finally, Cascadia also includes a section on Achievements. Spice up the game by attempting to earn different achievements in addition to the regular scoring, like scoring a least # total points, or play at least # of each Wildlife shown, or score at least # points per Habitat shown.

There’s so many different ways to play, from the different Wildlife Scoring Cards to the different achievements you can strive for that there’s really no need for any variations!

Reception & Awards

Cascadia won the 2022 Spiel des Jahres for German board game of the year! It’s also one of my favorite games :)