Cascadia

Give each landscape room to grow

Use the original English Cascadia base game from Flatout Games and AEG, following the publisher's base-game booklet. Keep Landmarks expansion pieces and cards, Rolling games, Junior and other stand-alone versions separate. The base box has 85 ordinary habitat tiles, including 25 keystones; five large three-hex starter habitats; 100 wooden wildlife tokens, 20 of each species; 25 nature tokens; 21 wildlife scoring cards; a cloth bag; and a scorepad. Bring a pen, or use paper and a pen if the pad is exhausted.

Set up indoors on a shared table. Leave room for each person's starter plus 20 additional hexes, with no overlapping landscapes. Put all 100 wildlife tokens in the bag and mix them. Without looking at tile faces, randomly select 43 ordinary habitat tiles for two players, 63 for three, or 83 for four. Shuffle those tiles into face-down stacks; return the rest to the box. The starter habitats are separate and do not count toward those numbers.

Place the five wildlife cards marked A face up where everyone can read them: one each for bear, elk, salmon, hawk and fox. Return all other scoring cards to the box. Randomly give each player one starter habitat, face up, initially without animal tokens. Put unused starters away. Set the nature-token supply nearby; nobody starts with a nature token.

Reveal four ordinary habitat tiles in a row. Draw four animals from the bag and put one below each tile, in order, to make four fixed pairs. The animal does not have to match the tile beside it: you will place the two pieces independently. Select the first player randomly, an option allowed by the booklet, then take turns clockwise. Read the five scoring patterns below before drafting.

Know what the five A cards reward

Animals are adjacent when their habitat hexes share an edge; touching only at a corner is insufficient. The terrain beneath an animal does not change its wildlife scoring pattern. Count tokens, not the small printed animal icons: those icons only tell you what may be placed on an empty tile.

• Bears: make separate groups of exactly two adjacent bears. A pair must touch no other bear. Count all qualifying pairs together: one, two, three or four-plus pairs score 4, 11, 19 or 27 points total. A lone bear or a connected group of three or more contributes zero on A. There is no penalty for a lone bear, and you cannot split a larger bear group into pairs.
• Elk: make straight lines along one of the hex grid's three axes. Each line of one, two, three or four elk scores 2, 5, 9 or 13. You may divide a longer line or connected arrangement into separate straight groups of up to four to get the best total, but each elk scores in only one group. Groups may touch. A five-elk line can score as a line of three plus a line of two: 9 + 5 = 14.
• Salmon: make connected runs where each salmon touches at most two other salmon. A run may bend; even a closed triangle of three qualifies because each touches only two. A qualifying run of one, two, three, four, five, six or seven-plus scores 2, 5, 8, 12, 16, 20 or 25 points. Score each separate run. Avoid giving a salmon a third salmon neighbor if you want that run to score. Branching is legal but changes scoring; you can return an unwanted token to the bag instead. See the scoring clarification in Host for an accidental branch.
• Hawks: count only hawks with no adjacent hawk. One through eight-plus qualifying hawks score 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, 18, 22 or 26 points total. Hawks next to each other do not qualify; being beside other species is fine. A does not require sight lines.
• Foxes: score each fox separately: one point per different animal species in its six neighboring hexes, up to five points. Another fox counts as one species. Two neighboring bears still contribute only one species. One animal can help score several different foxes; the fox itself is not its own neighbor.

Keep the cards visible throughout play. The A cards fix the patterns for this main game; changing to B, C or D changes what the species wants, not where it is allowed to live.

Take one habitat and one animal

Score wildlife and all five habitats

Leave the landscapes intact while scoring. Record each person's five wildlife scores using the A patterns above. Then, for each of mountains, forests, prairies, wetlands and rivers, find that person's largest connected area and score one point per hex in it. A connection must cross an edge where that same habitat meets itself. Two forest regions of sizes three and four score four, not seven. Score one largest area for each of the five habitat types, not only the single biggest area overall.

Count each starter hex individually. A split habitat hex counts as one hex toward each of its two habitats, provided each side connects appropriately to that habitat's area. A whole-habitat hex still counts as one, not two. Animals and empty spaces do not block habitat connections.

Compare players' largest-area sizes separately for each habitat. In a two-player game, the larger area earns two bonus points; a tie earns one each. In a three- or four-player game, a sole largest earns three and a sole second-largest earns one. If two tie for largest, award two each and nobody else gets a bonus. If three or four tie for largest, award one each and nobody else gets a bonus. A tie for second earns no bonus. For example, forest sizes 8, 6, 6 award 3, 0, 0 bonus points.

Add one point per unused nature token. Your total is wildlife + the five habitat-area scores + habitat bonuses + unused nature tokens. Highest total wins. If totals tie, compare unused nature tokens; the most wins. If still tied, share the victory. Repacking starts only after the table agrees on the scores.

Keep the draft and the scoring understandable

Let one person teach the game and ask another experienced player to check for omissions afterward. Keep jokes about animals separate from point rules. Show a good bear pair and explain that a third adjacent bear breaks it; then point out one habitat connection. Invite questions about the visible scoring cards before the first choice. A short discussion is useful; taking over another player's landscape is not.

People differ on how much thinking time the puzzle needs. While waiting, look for one habitat you could extend and one animal pattern you could improve, then adapt to the actual supply on your turn. Keep the four pairs aligned so nobody accidentally takes a tile with the wrong animal. Wait until the active player has finished placement and refilled before drafting; overlap is a house pacing choice, not a rule assumed here.

Salmon clarification: the printed booklet describes nonbranching runs but leaves a confusing edge case. For this guide's host ruling, identify every salmon touching three or more other salmon in the completed landscape. Exclude those offending tokens from salmon runs, then score the remaining connected runs. Identify all offenders first, using the original layout; do not remove one and then recalculate who qualifies. Those tokens remain salmon for other wildlife scoring, including a neighboring fox. This follows the designer-attributed clarification linked in Sources. It is not a license to exclude arbitrary salmon or split bear groups.

A fox counts species, not animal quantities; a hawk beside another hawk fails A even if both sit on mountain tiles. Use the printed icons and terrain boundaries, not what the habitat looks as though it should support. Nature tokens refresh animals, never terrain. A fifth qualifying bear pair and an eighth-or-more qualifying hawk do not extend their printed scoring caps.

For a bumped component, this guide suggests restoring a position everyone agrees was established. For an illegal placement caught before the next draft, correct the current move with the same drafted pieces; if no animal space works, return the animal. For a late mistake with an uncertain history, pause, consult the booklet and agree a visible remedy together before continuing. These correction suggestions are house practice, not official penalties. A seated tabletop game still needs readable icons, room, reach and component handling; confirm the group's needs rather than assuming accessibility.

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