Cascadia is a game centered around building an ecosystem in the pacific northwest. Every turn you choose from a communal selection of “habitat tiles” to grow your ecosystem and “wildlife tokens” that represent animals (elk, bears, foxes, trout, and hawks) to live in those habitats. By placing species in special keystone habitats, you can also get “nature tokens” that allow you to choose different combinations of habitats and wildlife (normally you’re locked into 4 pairs consisting of one habitat tile and one wildlife token) or to wipe the current wildlife token selections and draw 4 new tokens. You also get bonus points at the end of the game for having the most contiguous section of certain habitat tile type.
Overall, I really really liked this game. I thought the theme was really fun and the game plays as a really peaceful and chill experience. You have certain goals in the game to get more points such as having multiple elk in a line or having the most pairs of bears touching without any other bears bordering. It became kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, trying to find the best places to add your habitat tiles in order to reach these goals. And there was a certain excitement that came from waiting to see what animal would come out of the bag, especially when you had a long line of elk across your ecosystem and an empty habitat tile waiting for another one.
If I have to give any criticism, I wish that it had a little bit more player interaction. While it was a fun experience to just hangout with friends and put together these ecosystems, there’s basically no interaction between players beyond stealing the salmon token that just came out of the bag and your “Salmon-maxing” friend has desperately been waiting for. While you could introduce ways to sabotage or damage other players’ ecosystems, I’d be worried about that taking away from the chill vibe of the game and making things overly cutthroat. I think a fun addition to the game could be to add a couple of milestones that players race to in order to get bonus points, such as a certain number of an animal/habitat or specific formations or animals/habitats. This could add some additional competition while not creating too much animosity by having players focused on screwing over their friends and getting their carefully crafted ecosystems ruined. There were also some aspects of the rules that could perhaps be a little bit more clear; a major example in the game I played was that we had a big disagreement when handing out bonus points for the largest contiguous groups of habitats. Some of the habitat tiles are split between two habitat styles (such as mountain and river), and we disagreed on whether the river parts had to be directly touching or if the entire tiles counted as both habitats and therefore it could be the mountain half of the tile touching the other rivers and it would still count. To get our answer we had to dive into the details of a scoring example in the end of the rulebook, which eventually did get us our answer, but took more time then felt necessary (partially due to stubborn players, but also a lack of clarity in the rules)
