Base price: $XX.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: 30 – 45 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter! (Will update link when Kickstarter is live.)
Logged plays: 3

Full disclosure: A preview copy of Cascadia: Alpine Lakes was provided by Flatout Games. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game. 

I feel more personally invested in the Cascadia series now that I live here, I think. It doesn’t affect reviewing or anything silly like that, I’m just like … weirdly pseudo-patriotic about the whole area. It’s cool to have games about places where you live, I guess? I think I would have felt the same about games set in San Francisco (which happened after I moved) or games … maybe set in West Virginia? That last one is harder to commit to. I do get upset about Restoration Games’s portrayal of Mothman in Unmatched: Adventures, but that’s a very specific complaint based on the accuracy of the Point Pleasant statue. He’s a cultural icon. Let’s not worry about that. There’s a new Cascadia on the block, though, so let’s see what’s going on!

In Cascadia: Alpine Lakes, you’ve decided to go even higher, elevation-wise, to see what else the environment has to offer you. As you do, you miss out on some of the majestic fish, but you also get to see new animals better-suited to the new terrain. Exploring that may lead to new experiences and new habitats and the occasional pika, which is totally worth it. You see a lot more lakes up here, for some reason, but you and I both don’t know enough about geography or earth science to have much more to say about it than that. What new vistas will you see on this new elevated adventure?

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

If you’ve played Cascadia before, this should be pretty straightforward for you. First, shuffle up the tiles:

Use twenty tiles per player, plus three, and make a stack or pile of them face-down. Give each player a random starting tile, as well:

For each of the three Habitat Types, choose a Habitat Scoring Card to use this game:

Now, put the Wildlife Tokens in the bag and mix them up, then draw four tiles and place one Wildlife Token beneath each of them to make the tile market:

Set the Nature Tokens aside:

You’re just about ready. For an additional challenge, you can use one, two, or three Environment Scoring Cards, but no more than one of each type.

Either way, you should be good to start! Pick a player to go first.

Gameplay

Cascadia: Alpine Lakes is a new spin on Cascadia that introduces a new dimension: verticality! Let’s dive in.

Each player gets 20 turns. On your turn, you’ll choose a tile and its paired Wildlife Token. If you’d like, you can spend a Nature Token before choosing to select any tile and any Wildlife Token from the market, or you can spend a Nature Token to clear the Wildlife Tokens and draw four new ones. If all four Wildlife Tokens are the same, you must clear them for free, and if three are the same, you may clear the three for free (once).

Either way, when placing a tile, it has to touch at least one other tile. You can place it on top of other tiles if it’s completely covering two hexes below it (the same or two different tiles) and as long as it’s no more than 1 tile higher than any tile around it. This means you can’t place a Level 3 tile unless it’s adjacent to at least one Level 2. There isn’t really a limit on tile heights otherwise, but Level 4 is somewhat impractical. If the spaces below it have Wildlife Token symbols on them, the tile you’re placing must have a matching symbol on the same spot. If it has a Wildlife Token on it, you must move it up, so the tile you’re placing must have the matching Wildlife Token symbol on it too.

When placing a Wildlife Token, you can place it on any empty space with a matching symbol (including the tile you just placed). If you place it on a Keystone Tile (one with an arrow), gain a Nature Token. Note that this means that if you move a Wildlife Token up one level onto a Keystone Tile (by covering the previous spot), you gain a Nature Token as well.

That’s kind of most of it! Play continues until there aren’t enough tiles to refill the market (20 turns per player) and then you score. Each player scores the Habitat Cards and one point per lake per level (double a lake’s score if it’s completely surrounded by tiles). Then, each player scores 2 points per Wildlife Token on Level 3 or higher. For each Wildlife Type, the player(s) with the highest Token of that type also gain bonus points (3 then 1 for highest and second-highest, 2 points for tied at 3+ players; 2, 1 point for tied at 2 players). Gain 1 point for each Nature Token and score the Environmental Scoring Cards if you’re using them, and the player with the most points wins!

Player Count Differences

Largely the same as Cascadia: since it’s a game where you draft tiles from a random market, there’s not a lot of inter-player interaction. There are a few exceptions, of course, added in to make things more interesting in that department, but the major one is that the player with the highest animal token of each type gets a bonus at the end of the game. This makes things fairly zero-sum at lower player counts and challenging at higher player counts. You can expect to win two or three at two, but at four you’ll be lucky to get two (on average; your experience may vary). There’s also more market volatility at higher player counts, which can worth in your favor or against you. If there’s tiles you don’t like, they’re more likely to be gone by your next turn; if there’s a tile you want, it’s more likely to be gone by your next turn. The turn actions aren’t particularly intense or complex, though, so beyond that you won’t see a ton of differences based on player count. I’m not particularly concerned about it. Oh, also, there is a solo mode if that’s your kind of thing.

Strategy

• Surround those lakes! They score double when you do! That’s twice as many points! Especially for high-level lakes, that can be a free bump in your score.
• It’s worth checking on your opponents to see which animals they have at high levels so you can get the bonus. You’re competing against them to have animals at the highest levels. If you’re able to surreptitiously keep track (don’t make it obvious), you can always push the marmot up a level to steal those points away from them in the endgame.
• Optimize! If you do a little bit of everything, you might not get enough points to carry you. You don’t want to be getting a bunch of 2 point situations going on; try to figure out how to do enough of everything to get a few sizable scoring opportunities.
• Keep in mind how many turns you have. You only get 20! That means you’ll place 20 tokens, and that should factor into your plans and strategies. Sometimes you don’t get to take the tokens you want, so you should plan for a bit of volatility there, too.
• Stacking tiles is going to fundamentally limit your ability to make big stretches of certain terrain; hope that’s not an issue! If you’re stacking vertically, you’re not spreading horizontally, and that’s also a scoring influence; it’s why lakes are worth more the higher up they are. Incorporate limitations of the game into your plans.
• Nature Tokens are explicitly worth a point each at game end; is it worth the trade-off? I usually will spend one if I’m guaranteed I can get one back (from placing a Keystone and an animal token, usually). Don’t just spend them to spend them! Sometimes the games are closer than you’d expect.
• If you stack a Keystone Tile on top of a Keystone Tile, you get another Nature Token. This is worth noting just because it can be to your advantage to just get free Nature Tokens with very low effort. That’s always nice.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• New animals! I don’t remember what half of them are (I think there was a marmot?) but we insisted on calling the pika “Lil’ Fat Boy”, so, that made for a delightful game. Sometimes you just gel with things.
• I once again appreciate how much you can toggle the game’s built-in complexity with different features. The Flatout folks really want to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth with one box, I suppose: you have Family Mode, Intermediate Mode, the standard game, Advanced Mode, and I think there are some mini-expansions and potential Cascadia crossovers in potential futures? That’s pretty slick.
• I was initially worried about the decreased tile variance, but it allows for some interesting strategies and playstyles. You still want to create a lot of unique corridors (sets of the same tile type) and that’s a lot harder when you have fewer types of tiles to work with. It means you have to be more intentional about placement, and that’s a lot of fun.
• Everyone loves stacking tiles, so, they got that one right. Stacking tiles is great. The only thing that would make it better is thicker tiles, but that adds price and make the game vaguely incompatible with other Cascadias (if they go that route), I suppose.
• It’s always nice to look at the region you built once the game’s over; it gives me a sense of accomplishment. I think that’s a lot of the fun part of any tile-laying game. It’s what makes me want to play Carcassonne with all the expansions.
• More fantastic art! Beth Sobel does it again.
• I’m a big fan of how many different gameplay and card scoring options there are. There’s a lot of variability which makes me interested in the combinations; I’m sure someone will list off how many possible games you can play (which interests me less), but I’d love to see some Recommended Combinations for certain playstyles.
• End-of-game scoring is surprisingly smooth and fast. I always think it’s going to be harder than it is, and it’s always not. Good job on that front, Flatout team.

Mehs

• I miss the legendary Prairie Salmon. He was my favorite part of Cascadia, and maybe if we hold him true in our hearts and are better to each other, he’ll come back some day. To be fair, we don’t deserve him as we are now.

Cons

• Getting goals that conflict is always a bit dissatisfying, from a completionist’s perspective. We had one where we wanted little triangles of the same terrain and diamonds of forests, which was a bit annoying. I imagine there’s enough of these where this will come up infrequently but it was worth testing out. If that happens to you and you’re not feeling it, just trade in a new card before you start playing. I won’t tell anyone.
• This one’s definitely the highest end of the Cascadia Complexity Curve; I might suggest you start with other Cascadia games with new (or sleepy) players before you dive into this one. To be clear, there’s still a family variant, an intermediate variant, the base game, and the advanced game. It’s just that those all relative to the original Cascadia are, I think, one bump higher on the complexity tier (maybe half a bump). I don’t think the Family Variant is going to stress anyone out too badly, but the Advanced Variant adds another interesting scoring layer to some things which wasn’t as challenging as the original Cascadia.

Overall: 8.75 / 10

Overall, Flatout (and Spiel des Jahres award-winning designer of Cascadia Randy Flynn) have done it again with this Cascadia: Alpine Lakes. I do think that, like Catan or Carcassonne or Ticket to Ride, Cascadia as a property is just good enough that I’d play every game they make in that game family forever (that’s true about me for Carc, but it’s generally true with the other two games). Alpine Lakes’s major (only?) issue in my book is that it’s got a bit more base strategic complexity than Cascadia’s original version, but that’s kind of to be expected from a sequel game. I think the curve is much less aggressive than, say, going from Kingdomino to Queendomino, if we’re talking SdJ sequel games, but it’s enough to keep Cascadia as the original must-play for fans of puzzles and strategy. If you love Cascadia, though, you’ll likely love Alpine Lakes as well. There’s a lot of the same energy and design influence, but it’s being used in novel and different ways. Everyone loves stacking tiles, so, it’s cool that that’s part of the game now, and I like how they made stacking tiles simple; it just can’t be more than one level higher than every tile around it. So if at least one 2 is nearby, you can place a 3. Makes me wish the tiles were thicker to get more of a vertical vibe going, but I think you still get some sense of elevation from your play area every time you finish a game. It’s really cool. Players who enjoy configurable games will be right at home here, as well. Plenty of different scoring cards to mess around with until you find your favorite combination (or least favorite, if you get a bunch that don’t synergize well). It remains a great time to be a Cascadia fan, and if you’re one, you enjoy puzzly tile games, or you just want a game that reminds you of where you live if you’re a local, I’d definitely recommend checking Cascadia: Alpine Lakes out!

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