Overview
The rules take four minutes to teach. You draft a hex tile and an animal token together from a four-slot market, then place the tile in your growing landscape and place the animal on it. You are simultaneously building two puzzles: contiguous habitat regions (for one path of scoring) and animal patterns (for the other). The game ends when the tile bag runs out, roughly twenty turns in.
What makes Cascadia extraordinary rather than merely pleasant is the variable scoring. Each of the five animals has four different scoring cards, chosen randomly per game. Bear scoring in a game where bears score for adjacent pairs is a completely different puzzle from bear scoring in a game where bears score for groups of three. Twenty combinations at the base level; effectively infinite once you internalise them.
The solo mode is quiet and lovely. Beth Sobel's art is the calmest in the hobby. Mustard yellows, deep forest greens, the visual palette of a hiking guidebook. This is the game I hand to non-gamers, to family members, to anyone who says they hate board games. Nobody has ever disliked it.
