Cascadia is one of my all-time favorite games, combining easy-to-learn rules with plenty of strategic depth and a high degree of replayability because the base game comes with so many different ways to score the game’s five animal types. Designer Randy Flynn and the folks at Flatout Games are back with a new game, on Kickstarter for a few more days this week, called Cascadia: Alpine Lakes, that adds a little bit of complexity for a very similar game that’s slightly more difficult than the original to play well, but just as easy to learn. (Flatout provided me with a pre-release copy, so the rules I describe below may not be the same as in the final version.)
In Cascadia: Alpine Lakes, players are once again building environments that comprise habitat tiles and animal tokens. The habitat tiles here comprise two hexagons rather than one, and there are just three habitat types: forests, meadows, and glaciers. On your turn, you select one of the four habitat-animal pairs available from the table and add it to your environment, placing the animal token on a matching space anywhere in your space (not limited on the tile you just took).
Some hexes don’t show animal figures, but show lakes, which are one of the two main new features in the game. Lakes score 1 point per level, because the other new feature here is that you can build upwards, stacking habitat tiles according to a couple of straightforward rules (the big one is you can’t create a two-level drop from one habitat tile to any adjacent one). You also double a lake’s value if you’ve surrounded it with other tiles, regardless of those tiles’ levels.
Unlike in Cascadia, the animal tokens don’t score by themselves in Alpine Lakes. You score each habitat type based on the scoring card chosen at the start of the game – there are six for each habitat right now – and you can also use three advanced scoring cards if you wish to add a little more variance. The one way in which animal tokens score by themselves is in awarding points to the player(s) who have the highest animal token of each type, meaning one placed on the highest tile level, so there’s a little competition here, especially in a two-player game, to try to deprive your opponent of getting that advantage.
Players get exactly 20 turns, as in the original, and if you’ve played Cascadia you’re familiar with the nature tokens that you can acquire (same method here) and use to break up tile-token pairs in the market or refresh the animal tokens. It’s fundamentally the same game as Cascadia, adding some complexity because you have more choices to make, such as when to build upwards versus expanding outwards, and the relative values of each will shift slightly depending on the scoring cards used in any particular game.
I was already primed to like Cascadia: Alpine Lakes because I love the original so much – I just recommended it to someone with 8-year-old twins, in fact, because it’s so easy to teach and still gives the adults plenty to chew on. Alpine Lakes is a standalone game, but it feels to like like an expanded version of Cascadia rather than an entirely new title – which I much prefer to the “let’s extend a brand with a totally unrelated game under the same title” trend. If you like Cascadia and want something more, especially something a little more challenging, then Alpine Lakes is for you.