Game Overview: Cascadia, or Playing God in Northwest North America

I finally got Cascadia to the table, and this design from Randy Flynn and Flatout Games does exactly what it promises to do: Gives you and your fellow players "a puzzly tile-laying and token-drafting game featuring the habitats & wildlife of the Pacific Northwest".

By chance, a friend of my wife was visiting from Seattle, saw the box, and said, "Hey, I recognize that!"

Whether you will like what you're given depends on your taste for solitairish game experiences. In my two playings, once each with three and four players on a copy from the BGG Library, we've finished the game and been like, so, what next? Cascadia is like a glass of cool water on a tepid day: satisfying at the time, but not memorable.

Landscapes that will soon be demolished

The design provides a nice challenge: Pick a habitat tile and wildlife token combination each turn, and add it to your landscape. Habitats come in five types, each tile features one or two habitats, and you want to group like habitats together as you score points for your largest forest, largest mountain, etc. at game's end.

Each habitat tile shows 1-3 wildlife symbols, and you can place only one of the indicated wildlife tokens on this tile, with wildlife scoring at game's end based on whatever scoring card you used. In one game, elk want to stand in lines, while in the next forming rings will make them happy. Foxes, on the other hand, are sociable and score based on the animals around them. Wildlife comes in five types, so you're trying to place habitat tiles to both build large regions and give you the possibility of making an elk ring, putting bears in pairs, and so on.

Gameplay has no downsides. Each turn, you add to one or two habitats, then place a wildlife token and score points for that as well. (All scoring takes place at game's end, but the only time you lose points is when you spend nature tokens to adjust what's available for you in the drafting pool.) You're not necessarily planning anything, but taking stuff as it comes and doing the best you can with what's on tap to pile up the points.

For more thoughts on Cascadia, check out this video: