Cascadia: Alpine Lakes is designer Randy Flynn’s latest game, successor to the popular and well-regarded Cascadia.
Like Cascadia, this is a 1–4 player game for ages 10 and up, with an estimated playing time of 30–45 minutes. As with Cascadia, the game revolves around drafting pairs of Habitat Tiles and Wildlife Tokens, placing them in your play area (referred to as your environment) to construct a variety of scoring patterns based on randomly chosen objective cards. The main differences from the original game are that the tiles are double hexagons instead of single, and those tiles can be layered on top of others to move into the third dimension. Additionally, there are a few changes in how scoring works. All of this adds to the complexity and puzzliness of the game.
Game Play
I’m not going to describe how to play the game in detail; for that see a How to Play article elsewhere on the blog. Instead, I’m going to focus on the differences between this and the original Cascadia as that’s probably the major factor in deciding whether to ‘upgrade’ to this, or if you’re new to the Cascadia games, choosing which one to buy. (There are a couple of roll-and-write versions of the game, and several expansions for the original; you can find out more about the Cascadia range elsewhere on the blog).
In both Cascadia and Cascadia: Alpine Lakes, there’s a central display containing 4 pairs of randomly drawn tiles and animal tokens, and players are given one starter tile to build out from. A number of scoring cards are revealed (Habitat Scoring cards in Alpine Lakes vs Wildlife scoring ones in Cascadia), and play begins.
On your turn, you take a pair of tile and corresponding token from the display and add them to your environment in either order. When playing a tile in Alpine Lakes, it can be placed alongside existing tiles, as in the original game, or it can be placed on top of a pair of already played hexes. The only rules are that the tiles it’s being placed on are themselves at the same level (no sloping habitats) and it’s not allowed to be more than one level above all of the neighbouring hexes (no stacking one tile on top of another to gain height points). 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. The animal token you picked up is placed on any hex in your environment which displays its symbol.
Where you place tiles and tokens will be guided by the various components of scoring:
· Habitat Scoring cards (lower row in the image above), such as number of unique animals in forests or number of pairs of the same animal on connected glaciers; in a change from the original game, where the wildlife types were specified, they aren’t significant here, just their configurations.
· Lakes—points for lake hexes, depending on elevation and neighbouring hexes (reminder card to the right of the Habitat Scoring Cards).
· Wildlife Elevation based on the highest level of each of the wildlife types (reminder card at the right of the upper row).
· Nature Tokens—a point for each of these tokens in your hand; you gain them by placing wildlife on particular hexes, and can spend them to alter the tile/token draw phase of the turn.
· Environment Scoring cards (upper row above)—optional extra objectives, such as scoring for most or least of a particular animal, or particular configurations of hexes.
The original Cascadia obviously doesn’t include anything relating to height, and its scoring includes a contribution from the size of contiguous areas of each habitat type (known as corridors). I’ll also mention that there’s a terrific variety of Habitat and Environment Scoring Cards in Alpine Lakes, offering plenty of challenges at varying levels of difficulty.
As you might surmise from all that, there’s a lot to keep in mind when deciding where to place your tile and animal token! However, there’s a ‘family’ mode and an ‘intermediate’ one with simplified scoring. A beat-your-high-score solo mode is also provided, along with a bunch of scenarios and achievements (win using particular collections of scoring cards and hitting specific targets).
Component Quality
Like Cascadia, Alpine Lakes’ artwork is very pretty, created by Beth Sobel, whose many credits include Wingspan and several of its expansions.
The version of the game I have is the Kickstarter one, which deluxifies the game slightly: thicker tiles than retail, wooden Wildlife Tokens and linen-finish cards, among a few other things. (It would have been nice to have had wooden Nature Tokens for consistency, but they’re just card.) The tiles are certainly pleasant in the hand, and the chunkiness works very well for a game where height is important. However, they suffer from small blemishes on the back of a few, which is mildly annoying but has no real effect on game play. Slightly more unfortunate, but still utterly trivial, is larger than typical ‘tags’ left from punching the tiles out, quite noticeable in the picture above. I imagine both of these issues will be irrelevant for the retail game.
The rulebook is clear, and includes a very helpful scoring example as well as detailed explanations of some of the scoring cards (sort of like the glossary for Ark Nova). However, I feel that the 3d diagrams attempting to show tiles at various levels don’t work particularly well, and reckon it would have been clearer to use something like the exploded isometric style you see in Lego instruction booklets.
Verdict
Cascadia: Alpine Lakes is a gorgeous game with a good pedigree, and at least one of the Cascadias ought to take up a space on many a games shelf.
Gameplay here is not hugely different from the original, though scoring objectives are quite different—if you already have Cascadia, especially with some of the expansions, it might be a struggle to justify buying Alpine Lakes too. Alpine Lakes does include a Cascadia single card ‘mini-expansion’ letting you use one of the new Wildlife Tokens per player for game bonuses within Cascadia, such as gaining extra points at the end or Nature Tokens when placed, but this is hardly a major integration of the two games. (The Alpine Lakes crowdfunding campaign page appears to say this expansion is a Kickstarter exclusive, but I don’t think it is, as it’s covered in the rulebook, and there aren’t two versions of that.) There’s no real sense of being able to use the two games together, though I’m sure an enthusiastic BoardGameGeek member will come up with something clever!
If you’re new to the game, I’d recommend getting this one instead of Cascadia. If the additional complexity is a little daunting, you can use the family/intermediate scoring modes instead of the standard objectives, and just enjoy the fun of stacking tiles on top of each other.
About the author
Current favourite boardgames are Ark Nova and Spooktacular, with a side of Terraforming Mars and Paleo. When not playing games or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside over 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). In any time left over after all that, 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.
