Cascadia Alpine Lakes

• Designer: Randy Flynn 
• Publisher: AEG / Flatout Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30-45 mins
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4yjWdkB
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Cascadia: Alpine Lakes is a standalone follow-up to the hit spatial puzzle game Cascadia! In this puzzly tile-layering game, players continue the journey started in Cascadia to create the most diverse Pacific Northwest environment as they draft new double-hexagon habitat tiles and unique new wildlife tokens to build out — and up — their beautiful landscape mosaic.

Each game of Cascadia: Alpine Lakes features unique combinations of scoring objectives linked to how the five wildlife species are arranged across three different alpine habitats. Players also score for how well surrounded and elevated their lakes and wildlife are. Habitat and environment scoring cards add unique scoring conditions so that each game provides a new spatial challenge with thousands of possible combinations.

Turns are simple: Choose a habitat tile and wildlife token pair, then place them into your expanding environment. This time, each habitat tile is a double-hexagon and tiles can be stacked. Many of the core game mechanisms are similar to Cascadia, but the twist is that each habitat scores in different ways and your environment is now a three-dimensional spatial puzzle with new stacking and adjacency challenges.

To start, make the pool of Habitat tiles (based on player count), and select a Habitat scoring card for each of the 3 habitats. Place these next to the Lake scoring card and the Wildlife Elevation scoring card.  Each player gets a random Starter tile.  Now make the first market by drawing 4 Habitat tiles and then draw a random wildlife token to be placed directly underneath each tile.  If you want an advanced game, draw 1 to 3 Environment Scoring cards as well.

On a turn, the player will generally choose one of the 4 Habitat Tile/Wildlife Token pairs.  Some clarifications:

• If all 4 Wildlife tokens are the same, they are all discarded and new tokens are drawn
• If 3 Wildlife tokens are the same, the player has the option to discard those 3 and draw new ones.
• If a player discards a Nature Token, he can wipe any number of Wildlife tokens and draw new ones
• If a player discards a Nature Token, he can choose any combination of tile and token

Once a tile/token have been chosen, they must be played into the player’s environment. If you place on the ground level, you must place it adjacent to any previously placed tile.  You can place the tile on a higher level so long as it is fully and equally supported below. Further, if there is a wildlife token on the lower tile, it is moved to the upper tile BUT the new terrain must also support the wildlife token.  The new tile must be no more than 1 elevation higher than at least one tile adjacent to it.

Wildlife tokens must be placed on one unoccupied hexagon of an Habitat Tile that shows a matching wildlife icon.  If you place it on a keystone tile, you earn a Nature token.  Note that you can never place Wildlife Tokens on lakes.

After you place you tile and token, replenish the supply and the next player can take their turn.  The game continues until the market cannot be replenished-  at this point, each player should have played exactly 20 turns. Players then tally their final score:

• Habitat Scoring Cards – score each of the 3 Habitat scoring cards based on the rules printed on each card
• Lakes – Each lake scores 1 point per level of its elevation; this score is doubled if the lake is completely surrounded by other tiles
• Wildlife Elevation – every wildlife token on level 3 or higher scores 2 points; then for each type of wildlife, score 3/1 for most/2nd most highest of each type, ties broken by quantity at each level
• Nature Tokens – 1 point per leftover Nature Token
• Environment Scoring Cards – score per rules on each card in play

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with the most Nature Tokens left over.

My thoughts on the game

Well, there are a bunch of versions of Cascadia out in the wild now, and this is to be expected given the wild commercial and critical success of the base game.  Cascadia is becoming one of those touchstones of the hobby that I’ve found even non-gamers are familiar with – sure, not yet to the level of say Catan or Ticket to Ride, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how Cascadia has penetrated normie society thus far.

This new version has you building upwards as well as outwards.  It is certainly a bit more complex, and I would heartily recommend this game to gamers that wanted a bit more game out of the original Cascadia.

The first difference is the complexity of scoring. If you use all the options, you’ll have EIGHT different scoring cards in play.  You’ll have one for each of the terrain types as well as one for the lakes.  You’ll have scoring for the animals at elevation, and then there will be three advanced Environmental scoring criteria.  That’s a lot of things to keep track of – and a situation that I would certainly not recommend to newbies.

The tiles are also different, as they are hex doublets.  This allows for a lot more variation as well as quicker expansion.  The game wants you to be able to expand quicker as you’ll need a larger footprint to then allow you to build upwards with later tiles.  And, obviously, the 3D nature of the building is another big change from the original. You’ll still be constrained by the animal tiles that you have already placed (as they have to be legal in their newly elevated status when building up), but that does give the player a pleasing puzzle to try to figure out.

The lakes are a new addition, and they add some new strategy to the game as well,  In general, they score just by being placed on your board, and they can be doubled by simply being surrounded.  However, when you place them, you do lose a spot to hold an animal token, so there is a bit of option weighing that needs to be done when placing them. 

I feel that everything here is a bit more complicated.  The placement of the animal tokens on the basic level is the same, but the fact that you can change what terrain it is on when you build up gives you lots of opportunities for clever play.  It should also be noted that the scoring criteria here are different than the original – here your groups of animals all have to be in the same terrain area; you won’t have scoring that occurs across your board spanning different areas.  This restriction makes it a bit harder to get things to score, but you are again aided by the fact that you can change the terrain type under a token (Again as long as the token can be validly placed there).

The art, like most Flatout Games, is beautiful and thematic.  Beth Sobel’s art is just great.  The pieces are well done, with thick tiles that punch out easily, and brightly colored animal tiles that can be easily distinguished.

Is this the best version of Cascadia?  Honestly, it depends.  For my game group, yes, it probably is.  Base Cascadia is a bit too cozy and simple.  Here, the complexity in building upwards and dealing with the multiple scoring options is more our speed.   That being said, there are plenty of occasions where this wouldn’t be the right game based on the crowd.  

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral. Steph
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4yjWdkB