Cascadia – A Couple’s Review

Cascadia is a relaxed tile placement strategy game, where players build habitats through tile placement, and score for various animal tokens and their formation, alongside the largest habitats. A lovely game perfect for relaxed afternoons or evenings with family and friends who enjoy relaxed games.

Joshua enjoys Cascadia, for its solid gameplay loop and replayability. Every game of Cascadia we've both built different habitats and pursued different strategies. It also helps that we have different patterns to follow for scoring to make each game that much more challenging and different.

However, there's not much more to the game, as its low complexity while being easy to pick up, means that for players like Joshua, who enjoy a challenge with every game, don't feel as engaged. It is perfect as a relaxed Sunday afternoon game, and we'd highly recommend it as such!

Cascadia fits quite comfortably on our 90 x 150 cm table, along with snacks and the game box with the extra pieces.
For more space you could place place the game box by the side , as once you've set up, there's no other pieces that need to go in or out the box.

We wouldn't advise playing on a table much smaller as depending on how players are building their habitats, the space may feel a bit constrained.

You won't need to watch a video tutorial with Cascadia's rulebook as the rules and the game are fairly simple.
We were able to follow the rules and setup pretty quickly the first time, and the most amount of time we took was counting out the tiles we didn't need. The rulebook gets a thumbs up from us.

Question on how end scoring works for some of the patterns? They've got you covered with clear examples!
Everything you need is in the rulebook and in all the time we've played, there's only been once that we referred to reddit for questions, but the answer was in the rulebook!

Fortunately or unfortunately, we have no fun stories to tell here because the game was simple enough the first time we played that we got right to it, and debates only started once we were at the scoring stage. From box to first play, Cascadia's designed to get you playing quickly and with ease!

The very first time we got Cascadia out, we had the satisfaction of getting all the habitat tiles out of the cardboard that they come in, and poured all the animal tokens into the drawstring cloth bag that comes with the game. Then we counted up to 43 for a two player game. That took a while.

Once we were ready, we started looking at the scoring while playing to confirm what we wanted to do... Joshua will always claim I cheated the first time we played because I kept looking at the scoring and when questions were asked would slowly go through the book when it wasn't my turn.

A dramatic retelling would go something like this -

Joshua: Do the nature tokens count for score in the end?
Anjali: Hm, I don't think so, but lemme have a looksie...
Joshua *spending his nature token to choose an animal token and habitat tile*
Anjali: Oh, no wait, yeah, it counts towards scores at the end, sorry - one point each
Joshua: What!? You just said -
Anjali: Well I'm sorry... I just, like Brass didn't have scores for it... so I just assumed.
Joshua: Okay fine, but where you place the habitat tiles doesn't matter right?
Anjali: What, no, they do - you get scores for how big they are and only the players with the biggest habitat get bonus points
Joshua: You can't be keeping all this to yourself!
Anjali: I'm not! you read the rulebook next time then!!
Joshua: Actually... nevermind.

As you can expect, I won that game and not Joshua... but I didn't cheat!!

Anjali often ends up winning Cascadia by diving her focus between getting the best score through animal patterns, but so also in building the largest biome. In fact, scores though biomes are often what pull her into the lead, and Joshua has often complained that this seems like a cheat code of sorts... but hey, who's stopping the others from doing the same?

Joshua's strategy is often going after animal patterns that give him high scores. He's wrested a couple wins from Anjali using this strategy when she hasn't managed to get a base score that's close to his. A favourite in every game is often runs of fish for points and then bears or elks.

Of the various tile placement games we've played, Cascadia is one of the easiest to pick up and fun to play, with new players grasping the concept by the second round.

We should add a disclaimer here though, that those reading the rules to a competitive group, should remind a new group of players every so often to not just follow the patterns to score for animals, but so also build the largest biomes.

We highly recommend Cascadia for family game nights or for more relaxed game days where everyone can enjoy the zen nature of the game and build a gorgeous habitat by the end.

If you enjoy relaxed tile placement games, we've written an article about tile placement mechanics, where we explain the mechanic, why we enjoy it, and give some suggestions on other great tile placement board games. Read it right here!