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You find yourself wandering through the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. Over the horizon you see a stretch of prairie land that extends out from you and meets the edge of a forest. You think to yourself “if only that section of prairie land was longer, I could have snatched the bonus points for it”. You shake off the thought and continue with your wandering. You begin to climb up one of the many mountain ranges that dot this pocket of nature. After some arduous clambering, you reach the peak and spy two hawks perched on the edge of a cliff face, looking over their domain. “Well that’s just great!” you exclaim. “Now I won’t be able to score my hawks, why couldn’t one of them have been two hexes away!?”. Your reality begins to crumble. You are not really wandering through the Pacific Northwest. You are playing Cascadia, and the scenery is indeed beautiful but the effort to navigate it burns not your physical self, but your mental self.
A pleasant stroll through endless nature
Cascadia is a tile laying game in a similar vein to Carcassonne. On your turn you will pick a pair of Habitat Tiles and Wildlife Tokens from a selection of four pairs. Unlike Carcassonne, each player starts with their own three hex starting tile which players use to initially place down their Habitat Tiles. On each of the Habitat Tiles there is a mix of one or two habitat types: mountains, prairies, forests, wetlands and rivers. At the end of the game, each player will score points for the longest continuous section of each of these 5 habitat types in their board and will receive additional points for having the longest out of all the players. People may already see the similarity between this mechanic and Carcassonne’s system of features but Cascadia differs from Carcassonne in that any Habitat Tile can go next to any other Habitat tile, even if the habitat type doesn’t match. Will your player board look horrendous if you just randomly match bits of habitat together? Yes. The key however is that these relaxed rules to tile laying fit the games theme perfectly. Cascadia is a game that from the box art makes you calm. When you lay down your tiles and see a Prairie land begin to stretch out beyond you, it feels good because you weren’t forced to put all the tiles there. You wanted to do it just because it looks quite nice, and there is something rather freeing and calming about that.
Off the beaten track
You will notice that while gushing about the nice aesthetics of the Habitat Tiles I have forgotten about the Wildlife Tokens. The reason for this is that essentially I’ve duped you all with the previous paragraph. Cascadia isn’t a calming peaceful game of lazily laying tiles down to make nice expanses of nature, it is a game of natural selection where those who get the right tokens win, and those who don’t lose.
On the Habitat Tiles there are pictures showing which of the five Wildlife Tokens can be placed down onto the tile: Fox, Bear, Elk, Hawk or Salmon. Each of these tokens help contribute to the big point scorer of the game: scoring cards. For each game you will pick one of four (five if you have the kickstarter edition) scoring cards for each of the animals. While each scoring card is different, the themes for each animal are similar. Foxes love to be surrounded by other animals, Bears like to form clusters which do not interact with other bears, Elk like to form nice lines or rings in your park, Salmon love to form incredibly long lines and Hawks are grumpy and want to be left alone.
While both the Habitat Tiles and the Wildlife Tokens are a common resource among players, the Wildlife Tokens are by far the most scarce resource. Habitat Tiles can harbour a variety of different Wildlife Tokens while a Wildlife Token is specific to one of the five animals and there are only 20 of each in the bag. This means that, towards the end of the game, some tokens become incredibly valuable. In my experience, this happened the most for Salmon. On the basic scoring card for Salmon, you can score a massive 25 points for having a connected path of 7 or more. If you are playing with four players this means that only two players could hope to get a 7-Salmon run. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the most unloved animal was by far the Foxes, who were often only picked if they came with a convenient Habitat Tile. I’m almost certain that, in the games I played, we didn’t realise how powerful the Foxes could be; cursory searches of the internet seem to suggest they are quite powerful with enough planning. The problem however is that aesthetically, they do not score well. The Elk and Salmon make nice long trails through your board, the bears create lovely little families and the Hawks offer the most interesting scoring cards by far. The Foxes however just feel like filler, like painting over a dent in a wall.
Kickstarter thoughts
I am reviewing the Kickstarter version of Cascadia which comes with a new scoring card for each of the animals. For a Kickstarter bonus, it is a nice addition to the game with the highlights being the Hawk and Bear scoring cards. Hawks can score points based on the amount of empty space (i.e. no Habitat Tiles) around them, which adds a new dimension of preparation to how your tiles are laid out. Like the other Bear scoring cards, the Kickstarter card rewards placing Bears into isolated clusters. However, the new card scores one particular group of (between 1 and 4) Bears, with groups of 4 Bears scoring massive amounts of points, but being tricky to score effectively.
Cascadia counts itself as one of the more recent board game success stories and as such, the question of whether the game is simply overhyped has arisen. Having played many games of Cascadia in a very short amount of time I am firmly coming down on the side of it being a good game, maybe even a great one. The variability in the scoring cards means it offers either an accessible or intriguing challenge - depending on player tastes - and simplicity of the mechanisms means there's no chance anyone gets put off during the dreaded teach. Take a chance on the allure of nature; get Cascadia.
