Cascadia

Cascadia invites you to dive into the wild beauty of the Pacific Northwest, in a super relaxing game of tile-laying and token-drafting. Your mission is to create a thriving ecosystem by expanding your territory with hexagonal habitat tiles and populating it with local wildlife. You start with a few habitat tiles, and each round, you choose a new terrain tile that comes paired with an animal token. The trick is where you place these tiles and animals: each creature has a habitat and neighborhood preference, and you need to optimize these arrangements to score well. For example, bears might want to be in pairs, while foxes prefer a variety of animals around them. The game challenges you to create the largest corridors of the same habitat type, avoiding fragmentation of your ecosystem. Four options of tiles and tokens are available, and you have to make the best possible choice each time. If you have nature tokens, you can even 'cheat' a bit and choose the tile and animal separately, which can save your strategy. In the end, scoring comes from the extent of your contiguous habitats and how well you managed to satisfy the scoring conditions for each animal species, which vary each game. It's a double-layered puzzle that unfolds organically and very satisfyingly.