Cascadia

I picked this up because of the art, honestly, before I knew anything else about it. Beth Sobel’s stuff always gets me and this one’s no exception, elk and salmon and foxes laid out over these soft mountain tiles. Turns out the game underneath is just as good as the cover promised, which doesn’t always happen.

The core of it is a double puzzle. You draft a landscape tile and an animal token as a pair, or you can split them and take one of each from different spots on the row, and then you’re trying to build a habitat map that scores well for whichever animals you’ve committed to. Bears want pairs, foxes want to be next to exactly one other species, salmon want a run in a line. It sounds fiddly written out like that but it plays fast once you’ve got a round or two under your belt. I’ve taught this to people who’d never touched a hobby board game before and had them fully oriented in under ten minutes, no rulebook in hand by the second round, which is not nothing.

Where it splits people, and where I land in the middle myself, is player interaction. It’s mostly a solitaire experience, you’re building your own board, and the only real friction is drafting the tile someone else wanted before they get to it. I’ve heard this called out as the game’s one soft spot more than once and I get it, there were nights I wanted a little more table talk and less quiet tile-shuffling. But I’ll also say the scoring variants in the box do a lot of work here, and the solo scenario mode has kept me busy on nights nobody else wanted to play, with a handful of the harder challenges still beating me after a dozen tries.

It’s not a game I’d bring out for a tense two-player showdown. It’s the one I reach for when the night’s supposed to be easy.