"The winner of 2022 Spiel des Jahres, the board game industry's most prestigious award. And, its not hard to tell why.
This title has not reinvented the wheel with it's tile drafting/laying mechanic but OH BOY has it refined it!
This game just feels zen and puzzley and beautiful..."
 
J From GetBoard
 
  Nature         Drafting         Family        Tile Laying   
  2022 Spiel des Jahres Winner   
 
2021
1-4 Players
30-45 minute Play Time
✮✮✧✧✧ Complexity
Designed by Randy Flynn
 
Cascadia is a puzzly tile-laying and token-drafting game featuring the habitats and wildlife of the Pacific Northwest.
In the game, you take turns building out your own terrain area and populating it with wildlife.
You start with three hexagonal habitat tiles (with the five types of habitat in the game), and on a turn you choose a new habitat tile that's paired with a wildlife token, then place that tile next to your other ones and place the wildlife token on an appropriate habitat.
Ideally you can place habitat tiles to create matching terrain that reduces fragmentation and creates wildlife corridors, mostly because you score for the largest area of each type of habitat at game's end, with a bonus if your group is larger than each other player's. At the same time, you want to place wildlife tokens so that you can maximize the number of points scored by them, with the wildlife goals being determined at random by one of the four scoring cards for each type of wildlife.
Maybe hawks want to be separate from other hawks, while foxes want lots of different animals surrounding them and bears want to be in pairs. Can you make it happen?