Cascadia

Cascadia (2021) is a collecting world-building game where you create habitats for the wildlife of the Pacific Northwest. You balance building habitats and placing wildlife to score points. It's like Solitaire where you match habitats and wildlife, but with extra layers of play that add depth without overcomplicating things.

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Play involves taking turns to add tiles to your terrain or placing appropriate wildlife. The best scoring combinations are picked fresh each time you play. This may mean that foxes want other animals near them, or hawks need to be separate from each other or maybe bears want to be in pairs.

You start with three tiles to build from and a community pool of four random terrain and wildlife pairs to choose from. You need to choose carefully the combination that best suits your growing area. You want habitat tiles that match your existing terrain as this enables you to create coherent zones and wildlife corridors that score well at the end. You want wildlife to work towards the required arrangements of animals in the scoring criteria.

As play progresses you are balancing the points you score from habitat and the points you score by placing wildlife. Like Solitaire you are also having to make difficult choices between which item combinations to pick each go.

To begin with, you focus just on your evolving habitat, but to do well you also need to keep an eye on what everyone else is doing. There's a bonus at the end for playing with the biggest terrain of each type. Also, you can easily foil other players' plans by taking the pieces they need from the middle.

The result is a surprisingly streamlined game that is easy to learn and really enjoyable to play. It's the details of the play that make this work so well.

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Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Cascadia 2 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 11 weeks ago.