Cascadia

Today's review is of the 2021 release, Cascadia. For 1-4 players, it takes 30-45 minutes.

Overview

Can you create the most harmonious ecosystem? In Cascadia, you build out your terrain by placing tiles and place wildlife tokens smartly on those tiles to score the most points. There are five types of terrain and five wildlife species; each terrain tile pictures 1-3 species tokens that can be placed there. 

Each player starts with a base habitat tile. The other tiles are shuffled and place in stacks facedown. Four are turned faceup and paired randomly with wildlife tokens drawn from a bag. On your turn, you choose a tile/token combo and place both in your ecosystem. (You can place the wildlife token on a tile previously in your layout- it needn't be placed on the tile you just laid.) Flip a tile and token to replace what you took; turns proceed clockwise until the tile supply is exhausted. If you don't like a given combo, you can spend a leaf token (earned by using tiles with its symbol) to choose them independently.

At game's end, you score points for your wildlife based on placement rules (which differ for each species- some profit from long chains; others want to be separated) and the largest amounts of contiguous terrain. Do you have what it takes to win?

game in progress; image from here

Review

This is a simple concept done well. It has strong similarities to Carcassonne and Kingdomino, but enough changes to be a different experience. The tile/token combo is fun, and you can vary the scoring method for the wildlife using different scoring cards. Overall, this is a winner.

Rating: A