Cascadia Board Game First Impressions

Cascadia sees you build habitats and populate them with animals.

But will those animals be in the right pattern?

Cascadia is a puzzly tile-laying and token-drafting game featuring the habitats and wildlife of the Pacific Northwest.

Cascadia Game Play

For setup, you layout one of each wildlife scoring card. This will show how each of the animals will score in this game. So there is one Salmon, Bear, Hawk, Fox and Elk card in each game.

Then a set of tiles and tokens are laid out, these are the pairings players will be able to choose from.

On a player’s turn, they will pick one of these pairings, add the tile to their play area and place the animal token on any tile. The location tiles show which animals can be placed on them.

Some of the tiles only hold one animal and if you place one on those tiles you gain a nature token. These can be spent to either take any tile and any animal from the display, instead of their pairings. They can also be spent to return any number of animal tokens to the bag and redraw.

When the display can not be refilled the game ends. Players score for the 5 Wildlife cards. Players also score each type of habitat with each player with the largest scoring points.

Theme

It was interesting reading about the Independence Movement that is Cascadia and what could have been 200 years ago.

As for the animals, I liked the scoring that I can see is thematic… But when it’s not thematic (to me) it just becomes a pattern-building game for reasons.

Setup

Lay out cards, lay out tiles/animals and give each player their starting habitat.

Components & Artwork

The tiles and tokens are nice. The graphic design on the scoring cards is very clear so you know what you need to score.

The art is realistic which is what I want to see in a wildlife game.

Ease of Teaching

It is a very simple game with everything open information.

There are very few rules and the animal scoring is straightforward. I believe the rulebook suggests leaving out habitat scoring for beginners.

Cascadia Summary

Building the map out reminds me of dodecahedral Planet but in 2D of course. That also has an animal theme but there your habitat scores for the animals rather than them scoring separately.

Cascadia is really restrictive in a good way. You can’t always get what you want but you can usually get something you need. Meaning if you can’t add to your points this turn you can usually put something in place to add to them next turn.

One thing (admittedly after one play) was that the scores were nearly identical. You have a lot of options but some are better than others. Next time I’m going to work out ‘points per animal’.

For example, in my game, Elk were worth 2, 5, 9 and 13 for sets of 1, 2, 3 or 4. That makes them 2, 2.5, 3 and 3.25 ‘points per Elk’. For me, that makes 3 Elk more efficient? I could add that 4th one for the extra points, but I won’t go out of my way to do it.

It’s the same for Salmon, 5 is 3.2 ‘points per Salmon’ but 3 is 3 points per salmon. Maybe I’m overthinking it but basically what I’m saying is, next time I won’t automatically go for full sets. I’ll look for the value.

Maybe I’m just bitter because I didn’t get enough pairs of Bears which were really efficient.

But there will be a next time I hope? I enjoyed it even. It’s one of those games I would never own, but I wouldn’t necessarily turn down.

Jesta ThaRogue