Nature-based puzzle game Cascadia has been a very popular game from the start, and has been a persistent entry in Zatu’s top 10 for quite some time. Several expansions have dropped over the years, but a brand-new standalone game variant will be appearing soon: Cascadia: Alpine Lakes.
Like Cascadia, Alpine Lakes’ designer is Randy Flynn and the artwork is by the talented Beth Sobel, who was also responsible for the art on Calico and part of the team behind Wingspan. With that team, it’s sure to be a beautifully attractive and playable game.
Also like Cascadia, this one is a 1–4 player game for ages 10 and up, with an estimated playing time of 30–45 minutes. The game revolves around drafting pairs of habitat tiles and wildlife tokens, playing them into your environment to make a range of patterns for points based on a selection of scoring cards as well as contiguous regions of identical habitats.
The changes in Alpine Lakes are that the tiles are double hexagons instead of single, and there’s a move into the third dimension (perhaps a hint of Harmonies, with which Cascadia is often compared).
Game Play
I’m not going to describe how to play Cascadia—for that, see this article or the many others on the Zatu blog. Instead, I’m going to focus on the differences.
When playing a tile, it can be placed alongside existing tiles, as with the original game, or it can be placed on top of a pair of hexes already in the player’s environment. The only rules are that the tiles it’s being placed on are themselves at the same level (no sloping habitats) and the result is not allowed to be more than one step above neighbouring tiles (no cliffs). In addition, if a covered hex already contains wildlife tokens, the covering hex must support the same wildlife, and the tokens are moved up to sit on top.
When it comes to scoring at the end of the game, lakes are worth points, and both lakes and wildlife tokens score more the higher their elevation. There’s an additional bonus for whoever’s got the highest of the various types of wildlife.
As with Cascadia, there’s a ‘family mode’ with simplified scoring, and rules for solo play. Achievements and scenarios also reappear.
While this is a standalone game, the Kickstarter package includes an Alpine Animals mini-expansion that allows you to use Alpine Lake wildlife within the original Cascadia game, along with a few new scoring conditions. (It’s not clear if this mini-expansion will be available when the game hits retail.)
Final Words
All in all, this game is not hugely different from Cascadia—if you already have that, especially with some of the expansions, it might be a struggle to justify buying Alpine Lakes. However, if you’re new to the game, I’d recommend getting this one instead of the original.
One interesting aspect of the Kickstarter campaign is that a Print and Play pledge is available, costing considerably less than the physical game—that might be appealing to people who already have Cascadia and could reuse some of their existing components. At the other end of the cost spectrum, you can pay megabucks to get a signed, individually numbered, prototype version of the game as well; somewhere in between, you can acquire all the Cascadia games and expansions at quite a discount.
I have to confess it’s difficult for me to decide whether to back this Kickstarter or not. I’d get the game a few months before it hits retail, and a bunch of promo cards would be included, but the difference between retail and the advertised lower backer price would be more than swamped by VAT and delivery costs. Having said that, the Kickstarter version includes upgrades such as wooden tokens (nice) and linen finish on cards and box (meh), thicker tiles (nice) and a ‘deluxe canvas token bag’ (meh).
What I can say, though, is that it is a gorgeous game with a good pedigree, and it’ll definitely be an addition to my collection, one way or the other.
About the Author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
