Accessible but Challenging, Cascadia Is One of Our Favorite Recent Board Games

Some hex tiles only show a single animal type with a small pine cone icon on it. When you place the matching animal token on that tile, you get a nature token to use at any point later in the game. You may use it to take a hex tile and animal token from two different pairs in the market, or may use it to replace any of the animal tokens currently in the market with new ones taken randomly from the supply. Unused nature tokens are worth a point each at game-end, but their real value is in using them when you need something specific to complete an animal pattern or avoid a wasted move near the end of the game.

Once the last player has taken their 20th turn, exhausting the supply of hex tiles, you score animals and then habitats. Each animal has four scoring methods in the base game, which you can choose randomly or just select. The rules suggest using the “A” scoring methods for your first game, so just for an example, here’s how the five animal types score. Hawks score if they’re alone, not adjacent to any other hawks, and are worth three to five points apiece depending on how many you have. Bears score in mating pairs—yes, pairs of bears—and no, sorry, there are no ursine throuples in Cascadia. The more pairs, the more each is worth. Elk score for straight lines of up to five tokens, with more points the more tokens in each line. Foxes score one point for each distinct animal type adjacent to the fox, up to five points per fox token. Salmon score in runs, maxing out at seven salmon in a run for 25 points total. The B through D variants offer other ways to score, and the game comes with “family” rules where you score each animal the same way and try to get them in groups of three or four to max out your points.

The habitats score a little more simply, and they’re the same in every game. You score the largest contiguous area you have for each of the five habitat types, getting one point per tile included in that area. The player with the largest area out of all players for each type gets a bonus depending on the player count. Add in the points for unused nature tokens and you’ve got your winner.

Other than the difficulty you might have with some of the scoring methods for animals, there’s very little learning curve in Cascadia, even for folks who haven’t played a lot of games before—and I think the main challenge with the scoring is keeping five different scoring paradigms going in your head at once. You’ll probably focus on two or three of the animal types for most of your points, since an egalitarian strategy of getting four of each animal type is not only improbable but also a guaranteed loser. In fact, any strategy that pushes for two specific animal types is likely to make the player competitive, so even younger or novice players can jump right in and play well the first time out—the mark of a great family-level game. It also comes with a solo mode that plays pretty well, removing tile/token pairs from the market after each of your turns so you can’t always get what you want—although if you try, sometimes, well, you know the rest. Games take under an hour, and I’d guess you can meet the suggested time of 30 minutes shown on the box for two players who’ve played before. I’m all in on this game: it hits that sweet spot of accessibility and intellectual challenge that I most enjoy about this hobby.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.