Cascadia: Alpine Lakes raises Cascadia to new heights—literally—by adding another dimension to this tile-laying puzzle.

Cascadia: Alpine Lakes is a tile-laying game for 1 to 4 players, ages 10 and up, and takes about 30–45 minutes to play. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge level of $39 for a copy of the game. Additional pledge tiers are available for a print-and-play version, as well as an all-in that gets you all of the previous Cascadia titles. Note that although this title is in the Cascadia series, it is a standalone game and does not require any other Cascadia games to play.

Cascadia: Alpine Lakes was designed by Randy Flynn and the Flatout Games Colab, and published by Flatout Games with AEG, with illustrations by Beth Sobel.

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Note: My review is based on a prototype copy, so it is subject to change and may not reflect final component quality, though this game is pretty close to final and I imagine the finished game will look very similar to what you see here.

Here’s what comes in the box:

The illustrations in Cascadia: Alpine Lakes (as well as all the other Cascadia titles) were done by Beth Sobel, and I felt like it’s worth a special mention. I’m always just blown away by Sobel’s nature illustrations, which look like photographs at a first glance, but reveal her handiwork and brushstrokes if you look closely. I think it can be easy to just lay out the cards and assume they’re photography—but somebody made these!

The habitat scoring cards are large, tarot-sized cards with an illustration at the top and scoring rules below; they increase in complexity from A to D (and Kickstarter backers will also get the mini-expansion that includes a couple more scoring cards of each type). The environment scoring cards are smaller square cards and do not have illustrations other than the scoring diagrams.

The small wooden animal tokens will be familiar to those who have played the original Cascadia: thin colored disks with animals printed on them. This time, the collection of animals is: cougar, bald eagle, marmot, mountain goat, and pika. The accompanying cloth bag is a nice, sturdy fabric with a ribbon drawstring, plenty big so you have room to mix up the tokens well.

The one significant change you’ll notice in this version of Cascadia is in the habitat tiles—instead of single hexes, each one is a double-hex, kind of like a domino—each hex is a single terrain instead of a combination of terrains. As before, though, each individual hex has some animal icons on them indicating which animals may be placed there. Some include only a single animal, marked with a pinecone icon and an arrow on the edge—these are keystone tiles. Finally, there are the alpine lakes of the title—these don’t have any animal icons on them at all.

You can download a copy of the rulebook here. There are a lot of similarities to the gameplay in Cascadia, though tiles can now be stacked up, and the scoring rules are different.

The goal of the game is to score the most points by building your habitat and arranging the animals and lakes in it.

Shuffle the scoring cards in their individual decks and draw one of each type (or choose which ones to use). For beginner players, omit the square environment scoring cards. Place the supply of nature tokens nearby.

Shuffle the habitat tiles, and remove a certain number based on the player count, and make the rest into a face-down supply. Turn four tiles face-up in the center of the playing area. Mix the animal tokens in the bag and draw four tokens, placing them below the habitat tiles.

Give each player a starting habitat tile. The player who most recently saw an alpine lake or one of the animals from the game goes first.

On your turn, you select one of the four tiles and its accompanying animal token, and add these to your habitat. There are some rules for “overpopulation” if at least three of the animals are the same.

Tiles may be placed anywhere connected to your habitat and do not need to match terrain types, though depending on the scoring cards you’ll want to create certain arrangements of terrains and animals. Each hex can only hold one animal tile, of the types indicated on the hex; lakes cannot have animals on them.

If you place an animal on a space with a pinecone icon, you immediately gain a nature token. Nature tokens are worth points at the end of the game, but you can also spend them for two different effects:

Tiles can also be stacked: you can cover any tiles regardless of terrain type, but if there are already animal tokens present, they must match the corresponding spot on the new tile and you move them up. At least one space next to the new tile must be at the same elevation or one level lower. (That is, you can’t stack a tile so that it’s 2 levels higher than everything around it.) Lakes and animals will be worth more points on higher levels.

After your turn, draw a new habitat tile and animal token to refill the market, and it’s the next player’s turn.

The game ends when there are not enough tiles to refill the market—everyone will have 20 turns exactly.

Everyone scores points based on the habitat scoring cards. Generally speaking, each forest scores points based on having unique animals or animal pairs in it; meadows score points based on contiguous groups of the same animal; the glacier score is based on the number of  separate glaciers that meet a particular condition. More advanced scoring cards also require changes in elevation.

Lakes score points based on their elevation, 1 point per level, but the score is doubled if the lake is entirely surrounded by tiles. (The surrounding tiles do not have to be at the same elevation—just so that the lake is not on the edge of your habitat.)

Wildlife will score points if it’s elevated: each animal at height 3 or more is worth 2 points. In addition, there are bonus points awarded to the player with the highest and second-highest animal of each type.

Unspent nature tokens are worth 1 point each.

If you’re using the environment scoring cards, everyone scores points for meeting these conditions. Wildlife and habitat scoring cards will award points based on the arrangement or number of your animals and tiles, and spatial scoring cards often have to do with elevation.

The player with the highest score wins; ties go to the player with most nature tokens.

For younger or less experienced players, there’s a scoring card with two variant rules. You replace the three habitat scoring cards with this one—now, scoring is based on contiguous groups of animals within the same habitat type, but the three habitat types are otherwise identical. The difference between the family and intermediate versions is that the family version allows you to score points for a single animal, while the intermediate requires at least 2 animals together to score.

There’s also a solo mode—it’s set up like the 2-player game, but instead of a second player, you just always discard the right-most habitat tile and animal token after your turn, and draw to replace them. Your score is compared to a table to see how you did.

There’s also a comprehensive scenario and achievement section of the rulebook—similar to the original Cascadia—that tells you which scoring cards to use and may also include special goals. You’ll get a medal based on your score. Achievements can be earned in solo or multiplayer games, and are awarded for accomplishing specific feats like having no cougars or winning by at least 10 points or having at least 8 of a single wildlife type. The rulebook has room to track achievements for up to four players.

There’s also a mini-expansion that lets you bring some of the Alpine Lakes animals into the original Cascadia. It’s not a full expansion, but this is the one way you can combine the two games. Each player will start with 3 animal tokens from Alpine Lakes. Once per turn, you may add one of these animal tokens into your habitat, which will have its own scoring rules based on the scoring card. This card wasn’t available yet at the time of writing, but will be included in the final game.

Cascadia: Alpine Lakes keeps the feel of the original, but lets the players add several layers of complexity that take the game in fascinating new directions. If you’re familiar with Cascadia, the rules for Alpine Lakes will be very easy to pick up: take a tile and an animal, add them to your habitat. So far, so good. But then you start thinking about where to put things to score points, and you see some twists.

In the Cascadia base game, each animal had its own scoring rules—salmon in a long run, bears in pairs or trios, hawks separated from each other. The different terrains didn’t really matter as much and were functionally equivalent (until the Landmarks expansion), but you did want to make large areas of each terrain if possible.

Cascadia: Alpine Lakes turns that on its head: the animals are now functionally equivalent, and the scoring rules instead apply to the terrains. In the meadows, you want groups of the same animal, but it doesn’t really matter as much if you have one enormous meadow or several small ones because the score is based on the number of connected animals. Forests have requirements about having different animals, and ideally you want several forests that each meet the conditions because you’ll score per forest. Finally, glaciers can score big points if they meet the right conditions—but you score based on the number of glaciers. Just getting one glacier isn’t great, but setting up three or four can be worth quite a bit.

The lakes are another consideration as you choose and place tiles. Lakes don’t have animal spaces on them, so taking them may mean a gap in a group of animals. On the other hand, they’re easy to stack on top of because there won’t be any animal tokens on them anyway. Lakes on the ground level aren’t worth much, but if you can build up a high plateau and place a few lakes up there, totally surrounded, that adds up.

The hardest part to wrap your head around is the stacking. Increasing the elevation will make your lakes worth more points, and your wildlife will score points if you get them to level 3, plus you’re competing with other players to have the highest of any given animal. But for each tile you stack, that’s two fewer spots to add new animals since you’re doubling up. At the very beginning of the game, you’ve got 4 spaces to place animals, so taking a tile could give you 6 animal spaces with 1 animal to place. As the game progresses, every tile you take can add 1 or 2 animal spaces (depending on lakes), but every time you stack you’re reducing that number. Over the course of 20 turns, how many tiles do you want to stack so that nothing is wasted? If you don’t have room for the animal token, you just discard it—but that’s probably wasted points.

The other tricky piece of the puzzle is the way that the terrains shift as you stack. You may have built out the perfect forest with all the animals you need—but if the piece you stack on top is a meadow, then you’ll have to work on that forest again, or hope that you can stack a forest on top of that later. There have been times where I had two separate glaciers that would score points, but then stacking a particular piece would connect the two glaciers, making it a single corridor and cutting down my score. It turns out that arranging your animals on the ground level is perhaps more important than arranging the terrain that will get covered, because the animals can’t be changed as the tiles stack up. It’s difficult to plan for that, but that’s a key part of the strategy.

I also like the way that the scoring cards get progressively more complex, just like in the original game. Each one makes the scoring conditions just a little harder or more specific, and then the D card requires terrains to span multiple elevations. With the A, B, and C cards, it’s possible for players to just play without stacking at all (though the wildlife scoring will be lost). With the D cards, stacking becomes essential.

In the time I had the prototype, I taught Cascadia: Alpine Lakes to several groups of players, so I mostly stuck with the A and B cards, and we didn’t introduce the environment scoring cards yet. I could tell that it would take some practice to get used to the stacking before we were ready for those, but I like that this is a game that will let you gradually add more to it as you get more experienced, and there’s a lot of room for growth.

Overall, Cascadia: Alpine Lakes is a fantastic tile-laying puzzle with echoes of the original Cascadia but its own unique feel. I look forward to digging deeper (or stacking higher?) when the finished game arrives!

For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Cascadia: Alpine Lakes Kickstarter page!

Disclosure: GeekDad was loaned a prototype of this game for review purposes.

Source: geekdad.com