Two Rex Plays #16 - Cascadia
In this edition of Two Rex Plays we’re discussing Cascadia, a tile & token placement game designed by Randy Flynn and illustrated by Beth Sobel. Using an entwined drafting system, players select terrain hexes to build diverse natural environments for their animals to inhabit.
Here are the design features we enjoyed:
Thematic placement and scoring rules – Whilst you score some points by simply introducing animals to the correct environment hex, you’ll score far more if you can also meet the placement rules which are specific to that animal. For example, the hawk needs space away from other birds of prey (so they have a large enough hunting ground), salmon need to be placed in a way that invokes a winding river, and bears thrive in mating pairs. These rules are designed thematically which assists with immersion, but more importantly helps you to remember them without having to refer to the animal cards. This keeps the decision space manageable, as you’ll need to juggle several placement rules at the same time.
Entwined drafting - To setup the game your draw a row of environment hexes and place an animal token below each one. The two are linked, so each player drafts both the hex and the animal underneath. As well as speeding up the game, this introduces interesting trade-offs - perhaps you want a particular animal but the tile it’s been drawn with is difficult to place as it forces you to break a terrain connection. There are ways of breaking this link using special fir cone tokens, but these are few and far between, so you need to think carefully about when best to use them.
Terrain placement - Most of your points are earned by the animal placement mechanism, but there’s a separate ‘B’ game underlying this core mechanic. The hex tiles have terrain markings on them which earn you bonus points if you can place these in a connecting run. This geometric challenge adds a layer of complexity that complements rather than interferes with the main game.
Weight and speed - We’d place this somewhere between light and medium in terms of complexity, and the game supports this choice in several aspects of the design. For example, it’s very quick to setup, there are no resources to keep track of, and there are only 5 animals to consider. Once you know the rules a two-player game will take around 30 minutes.
We recently played Life of the Amazonia which has the same theme and some similar mechanics, but that’s clearly a ‘weighter’ game than Cascadia. We enjoyed both experiences, and it’s interesting to contrast the two to see the different design choices each team made. Essentially Cascadia is laser focussed on the core idea of building an environment and pacing animals, whilst Life of the Amazonia builds on that idea by layering on more choices (unique starting animals and additional goal cards) and introducing more mechanics (e.g., using bag building to gather resources to purchase animals, rather than simply being allowed to pick them without any resource costs).
Interested in Cascadia? Find out more here:
Cascadia Kickstarter page
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flatoutgames/cascadia
Beth Sobel Illustration
Tabriz – the next game from designer Randy Flynn
https://gamefound.com/projects/crafty-games/tabriz#/section/project-story