How to play Cascadia

1–4 players (best at 2–3) Light — tile-laying puzzle

What is Cascadia?

Cascadia is a tile-laying and token-placement game by Randy Flynn in which you build a personal Pacific-Northwest wilderness from hexagonal habitat tiles and populate it with wildlife. Each turn you draft a tile-and-token pair from a shared market, placing the tile to extend your growing landscape and the token on any tile whose terrain icons allow that animal.

The game earned the Spiel des Jahres in 2022 for exactly this quality: simple rules that open into a surprisingly rich spatial puzzle. You're always reading your tableau against the five animal scoring cards on the table, nudging your landscape toward the patterns that will pay off — a long salmon run, a loose cluster of elk, a pair of bears tucked into old-growth forest.

Setup

Shuffle all habitat tiles into a face-down supply pile.
Sort the wildlife tokens into five separate face-down pools — one per animal (bear, elk, salmon, hawk, fox) — and place each pool within easy reach.
Draw one scoring card at random for each animal (from the standard or family-friendly set) and lay them face-up where everyone can see them.
Seed the market: flip four habitat tiles face-up in a row, then draw one random wildlife token to place on each — these four tile-and-token pairs are what players will choose from on their turns.
Give each player a starter cluster of three interlocking hexagonal tiles (already linked together) to anchor their personal tableau. These are pre-designated starter tiles — sort them out before shuffling the main supply, as they are a separate set and should not be mixed in with it.
Give each player 1 nature token.
The player who most recently spent time outdoors goes first.

How to play

On your turn, complete these steps in order:

Draft a tile-and-token pair — choose one of the four columns in the market and take both the habitat tile and the wildlife token paired with it. If you spend a nature token first, you may mix and match: take any available tile together with any available token.
Place the habitat tile — add it to your tableau adjacent to at least one tile you already own. Matching terrain types along shared edges connect into larger habitat zones.
Place the wildlife token — set it on any tile in your tableau whose printed habitat icons include that animal. A tile can hold at most one token.

After you draft, refill the market by turning up a new tile and a new token. If three or four of the revealed tokens show the same animal, discard all copies of that animal and replace them — this keeps the market from becoming clogged. After the final tile is taken from the supply, scoring begins.

How to win

At game end, count points from three sources: wildlife scoring (each of the five animals scores by its unique card pattern — salmon in longest connected run, hawks isolated with no adjacent hawk, elk in groups of certain shapes, bears in adjacent pairs, foxes adjacent to as many different animals as possible), habitat bonuses (points for your largest connected zone of each terrain type), and nature tokens (one point each for any you have left). Highest total wins.

The key strategic insight is that your habitat and wildlife goals interact — building a long corridor of a single terrain earns the habitat bonus and also channels your tile placements into shapes that can satisfy animal scoring patterns. Read the scoring cards early and commit: a fox strategy demands a diverse neighbourhood; a hawk strategy rewards a spread-out, sparse arrangement. When in doubt, protect your nature tokens for moments when the market offers exactly the right animal but the wrong tile.