Cascadia – The Award-Winning Puzzle of the Pacific Northwest

Build sprawling habitat corridors, place wildlife with care, and create the most harmonious ecosystem — the Spiel des Jahres 2022 winner that proves a simple puzzle can be endlessly replayable.

Cascadia is a tile-laying puzzle game designed by Randy Flynn and illustrated by Beth Sobel, published by Flatout Games in 2021. Set in the Cascadia bioregion stretching from Oregon and Idaho through British Columbia and the Yukon, players compete to build the most harmonious ecosystem by drafting habitat tiles and matching wildlife tokens into their own personal landscape.

Each turn, players select one of four available tile-and-token pairs displayed in the center of the table, placing the habitat tile adjacent to their existing landscape and the wildlife token onto any matching habitat. The puzzle emerges from balancing two competing scoring systems — building the largest contiguous habitat corridors while also satisfying randomized wildlife scoring conditions that change every game, since one of four possible scoring cards is randomly selected for each of the five animal species at setup.

Critics and players alike have praised Cascadia for how deceptively simple its rules feel at first, only to reveal genuine tension once players start weighing habitat corridors against wildlife placement patterns — a balance that the Spiel des Jahres jury specifically highlighted when awarding the game in 2022.

How to Play — Watch First

What Is Cascadia?

Cascadia is a tile-laying and set-collection puzzle game for 1 to 4 players. Each player builds their own personal landscape using hexagonal habitat tiles representing five terrain types — mountains, forests, prairies, wetlands, and rivers — drawn from a shared market of four tile-and-token pairs available each turn.

Scoring rewards two distinct strategies simultaneously: building the largest connected corridor of each habitat type (with bonus points for the largest of all players), and arranging wildlife tokens to match one of four possible scoring patterns randomly selected for each animal at the start of the game. Nature tokens, earned by correctly populating special Keystone tiles, let players bypass the standard tile-and-token pairing restriction for added flexibility.

The Five Wildlife Species

What Makes It Stand Out

How Does It Play?

Setup takes roughly five minutes — habitat tiles are removed based on player count, wildlife scoring cards are randomly selected for each of the five species, and four tile-token pairs are revealed to start the shared market. Each player begins with a random three-hex starter tile already showing all five habitat and wildlife types.

On your turn, you choose one tile-token pair from the display, place the habitat tile adjacent to your existing landscape, and place the wildlife token on any tile in your landscape that supports that animal. If three or four of the four available wildlife tokens are identical, players may discard and refresh them — a small but important rule that prevents the market from getting stuck. The game ends once all habitat tiles have been drawn, and final scores combine habitat corridor points, wildlife pattern points, and any leftover Nature tokens.

Reviewers consistently note the game's low player interaction — players build entirely independent landscapes with no direct conflict — which some find relaxing and meditative, while others (particularly at higher player counts) find it can create longer downtime between turns since nothing your opponents do affects your own landscape decisions.

Rating Breakdown

Pros & Cons

Who Is This Game For?