How to play Cascadia

Cascadia is a tile-laying and token-drafting game by Randy Flynn in which you grow a personal Pacific-Northwest wilderness from hexagonal habitat tiles and populate it with wildlife. Each turn you draft one tile-and-token pair from a shared market of four, add the tile to your landscape, and place the animal on a tile that welcomes it.

The game earned the 2022 Spiel des Jahres for exactly this quality: simple rules that open into a surprisingly rich spatial puzzle. Every game deals a fresh combination of five animal scoring cards, so you're always reading your terrain against this game's patterns — a long salmon run, a loose herd of elk, a pair of bears tucked into old-growth forest.

Never played a tile-layer? Think of it as two overlapping jigsaw puzzles fighting for the same space: the terrain wants big unbroken zones of matching habitat, while the animals each want their own geometric pattern. The tile you need and the animal you need almost never arrive in the same pair — managing that friction is the whole game.

What's in the box, and what each piece does at the table:

• 85 habitat tiles — hexes showing one or two of the five terrains (mountains, forests, prairies, wetlands, rivers), each also printed with 1–3 animal silhouettes saying which wildlife may live there. 25 of them are keystone tiles: single-terrain hexes that pay you a nature token whenever you place their matching animal on them.
• 5 starter habitat tiles — one big three-hex piece per player, containing all five terrains. Your whole environment grows outward from it.
• 100 wildlife tokens (20 each: bear, elk, salmon, hawk, fox) — round animal chips drawn blindly from the bag to stock the market. Placed one per tile, they're what the scoring cards actually count.
• 21 wildlife scoring cards (4 per animal + a family set) — each game uses one card per animal, defining the pattern that animal scores this game: pairs of bears, lines of elk, runs of salmon, isolated hawks, foxes with company. Swapping cards is what makes every game a new puzzle.
• 25 nature tokens (Douglas-fir cones) — the game's wildcard currency: spend one to break the market's pairings or purge unwanted animals; each unspent one is a point at the end.
• 1 cloth bag — holds and hides the wildlife tokens for random draws.
• 1 scorepad — organizes final scoring: animals, corridors, majority bonuses, leftover cones.

On your turn:

1. Check for overpopulation. If all 4 market tokens are the same animal, they're automatically wiped and redrawn. If exactly 3 match, you may wipe those 3 (once per turn). This is your free defense against a market drowning in an animal nobody wants.
2. Optionally spend nature tokens — as many as you like: either take any tile with any token (breaking the fixed pairs), or wipe any number of tokens and redraw them. This is why cones are precious: they're the only way to get the right tile AND the right animal in one turn.
3. Draft one of the four pairs — tile and token together, as paired.
4. Place the tile anywhere touching at least one tile of your environment. Tiles never move again and never stack. Matching terrain edge-to-edge is not required — but only connected same-terrain groups score corridor points, so every mismatched edge quietly costs you.
5. Place the token on any tile of yours showing that animal's silhouette and holding no token yet — the new tile or any older one. Can't or won't place it? Toss it back in the bag. If it lands on a keystone tile with the matching animal, take a nature token.
6. Refill the market and pass clockwise.

A turn, played out. The elk card this game scores straight lines, and Ana has two elk in a row pointing at an empty prairie edge. The market offers an elk — but paired with a river tile that would break her mountain corridor. She spends a nature token, takes the river-less prairie tile with the elk instead, extends the line to three, and — because the prairie hex is a keystone tile — takes a fresh cone right back. Net cost: zero. Beto, next up, watches the fourth market slot flip to a third salmon and wipes all three, hunting for the hawk he actually needs.

The game ends the moment the tile stacks can't refill the market — each player has played exactly 20 turns. Tally four sources on the scorepad:

1. Wildlife — each animal scores by its card's pattern: classics include bears in isolated pairs, elk in lines, salmon in winding runs, hawks that keep their distance, foxes rewarded per unique neighbor.
2. Habitat corridors — for each of the five terrains, 1 point per tile in your largest connected group of that terrain.
3. Corridor majorities — the wilderness-building race: with 2 players, +2 per terrain for the larger corridor (+1 each if tied); with 3–4 players, +3 for the largest and +1 for the second (shared ties shrink the bonus).
4. Nature tokens — 1 point per unspent cone. Ties go to whoever kept the most cones.

Strategy in one sentence: read the five cards first, then let terrain lead. Corridors plus majorities are steady money that no draw luck can take away, and a tidy landscape naturally creates the shapes the animals want. Two traps to avoid: filling a tile with the wrong animal (tokens never move — a stray fox can block a salmon run forever), and hoarding every cone to the end — a cone spent to complete a 10-point pattern beats the 1 point it would score in your hand.