Pick up the latest issue of the UK's fastest-growing gaming magazine in print or digital here or subscribe to make sure you never miss another issue. In this calming game, you take turns building out your own terrain area and populating it with wildlife. You will not only score for each of the five animal cards but also for your largest area of each type. In Cascadia: Landmarks expansion, players create sprawling habitats and place beautiful natural landmarks within them.

But in that case, it is the active player’s choice (aka yours in solo mode) as to whether those 3 are replaced or not. If you are playing with children, or you wish to simplify the gameplay for yourself or other players, the game includes variant scoring. Each turn you pick and place hexes to create terrains that provide the correct habitats for the diverse and beautiful local wildlife.In total, Cascadia hit the table seven times in January and every game was a rip-roaring success with all who played it. Players score points by creating the most harmonious spatial arrangements of wildlife, and also by creating the largest contiguous habitat corridors. Finally set the Nature Tokens (pine cones) off to one side but within easy reach and give everybody a 3 hex Habitat Starter tile. Note that if 4 Wildlife Tokens are all the same, this is known as “ overpopulation“, and they are removed and replaced with 4 new randomly selected ones.

The easy mode makes each animal score in a similar way, reducing the number of scoring conditions the player must learn. Ultimately, whoever scores the most Cascadia points (don’t forget unused Nature Tokens score 1 point too!Landmarks give each environment its own look and feel, while also providing dynamic endgame scoring bonuses! The scoring objectives are juicy point providers, but it’s impossible to achieve them all and get the corridor bonuses in just 20 turns. This is a combo tile showing a random selection of 3 out of 5 terrain types (Mountains, Forests, Prairies, Wetlands, and Rivers). First shuffle the hex Habitat Tiles and stack them up face down – the number of tiles in the game depends on player count (43/63/83 for a 1-2/3/4 player game).

And if the regular game is just not enough Cascadia for you, there is the epic Achievements section at the back of the rulebook for even more chillaxed crunchiness! Take a journey to the Pacific Northwest as you compete to create the most harmonious ecosystem in Cascadia! Match rivers, prairies, wetlands, forests, and mountains and populate them with different wildlife species. NB: I was a little confused by the shapes in this section, but they are just markers each player can use to track their progress). Each nature token allows you to take any habitat-and-wildlife combination you like from those on offer (rather than the usually enforced random pairing), or alternatively wipe and replace any number of wildlife tokens.The Cascadia board game (designed by Randy Flynn) is a puzzly tile-laying and token-drafting game featuring the habitats and wildlife of the Pacific Northwest. There’s also a Family variant Wildlife Scoring Card which replaces all 5 individual animal goals with a single objective which is great for younger or less experienced gamers. Even when a winner is declared, it doesn't feel like a soul-wrenching defeat, ensuring friendships reman intact.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Cascadia is a puzzly tile-laying and token-drafting game featuring the habitats and wildlife of the Pacific Northwest. As I mentioned earlier, it’s two puzzles in one that must be navigated in conjunction, like a tandem being ridden in two separate directions. Personally I love making the contiguous habit corridors as big as possible, but we also liked that variety of the different animal card rules. We love the easy to explain rules and then the amount of strategy you can put into placing a tile and a token.Four tiles are on display, with each tile being paired at random with a wildlife token, so you must make the best of what’s available — unless you have a nature token to spend so that you can pick your choice of each item.