Cascadia

Cascadia is a 1-4 player game where players attempt to make a their own ecologically balanced environment more robust than their opponents. The game is modestly priced, takes less than an hour to play, and has simple rules but great depth of strategy. No two games will be alike.

I saw that this game had great reviews and highly rated on the Board Game Geek list for family and abstract games.

Players start with a random starting area made up of a three hexes piece. Each hex has different solitary or mixed terrain as well as solitary or mixed animals (bear, elk, fox, bird of prey, fish). Enough face down wilderness tiles are chosen so that there are 20 per player and four of them are revealed. Then four wildlife animal token are drawn from the bag and placed below the wilderness tiles as pairs. This forms the active selection area. A nature leaf token is given to each player. Then a random scoring card for each animal (out of four possible ones) are drawn and placed on the board for all to see.

Each turn, the first player choses a wilderness tile and the wildlife token below it. They place the tile connected to their existing ecology and then the wildlife token is placed on their ecology on a hex matching the animal depicted, no more than one animal per hex. Wildlife tokens placed on a hex with a nature leaf symbol means that player receives a nature token. If the player plays a nature token before drawing wilderness hexes and wildlife tokens they may choose any hex and token, not just those that are paired, or may put aside any number of wildlife tokens and replace them from the bag. Play then proceeds to the next player.

Once all players have gone, the right most hex is discarded and the right most token is put aside with replacement hexes and tokens placed on the board. The set aside tokens are then placed in the token bag. Play continues like this until there are no more tiles to fill the active selection area.

Points are gained for completing scoring objectives for the animal cards, for numbers of hexes in size for each wilderness type (and bonus points for the most of any particular type amongst players), and nature tokens.

There is a very interesting flow to the game as you are building your own ecological area and the choices must be made from the hexes and tokens in the active selection area as well as your own ecological area. I played two solo games and I would like to try this with two, three, and four players. There is also family and intermediate scoring cards for getting introduced to the game as well as with younger players. I think this will be a standard one to bring out once I teach more of my friends to play it.