Cascadia Alpine Lakes: Review

Cascadia Alpine Lakes: Review

Introduction:

Cascadia has become Flatout Games evergreen franchise for good reason. The series is an engaging tile placement puzzle where players are balancing flora and fauna to create a wonderful landscape. The game has a great ease of play with a challenging strategic depth. The franchise has delivered the base game with its expansion, two compatible roll and write games and a junior edition. Alpine Lakes is the latest iteration. Alpine Lakes contains two main twists to the formula, instead of focusing on the animals players are now more (not fully) focused on the terrain. The other twist is no longer is the game played on one layer, instead the terrain will be built upon itself creating many new layers to the puzzle. 

Game Anatomy:

Habitat Tiles:

In this version of Cascadia habitat tiles are now two hexagons connected. These hexagons can appear in any combination of glacier, forest or meadow habitats. These hexagons will also either have a lake, or any mix of one to three potential wildlife per hexagon.

There are four starting habitat tiles with four hexagons combined.

Wildlife Tokens:

There are five wildlife represented in the game. The Cougar, Eagle, Pika, Marmot and Mountain Goat. These animals will be drafted and placed at the same time as the tiles. The tokens will help meet the habitat and environment Scoring cards.

As a mini expansion a few (three at a time) of these wildlife tokens can be used in the original Cascadia to add an additional way to score. By placing these animals on any vacant spot on the player's board. The scoring card for this is double sided. 

Nature Tokens:

Nature tokens are gained when players place a wildlife tokens on a Keystone habitat. These habitats will only have one possible animal that can be placed. The player will also gain nature tokens when a wildlife token is moving up in elevation to a Keystone habitat.

The nature tokens are duel use, they are either a point if unused at the end of the game; can be spent to refresh the wildlife tokens or can be spent to choose any wildlife tokens with any habitat tile.

Habitat Scoring Cards:

Besides the lake (which has one) each habitat has four different scoring cards. Each habitat will use one different scoring card per game. 

These cards will give unique scoring conditions for how these habitats will score at the end of the game. These will take in consideration of wildlife types on habitats or simply need to have habitats with wildlife on to make scoring available.

The lake cannot have wildlife tokens placed on top and has a unique way that the lake will always score. Each lake will score equal to the level the tile is on. Followed by a multiplication of two if the tile is completely surrounded by hexagons no matter those hexagons level. For example the below image would be 2 by 2 for a surrounded lake on elevation two. 

Wildlife Elevation Scoring Card:

It is important to reach higher with the wildlife in Alpine Lakes. Each wildlife token at elevation three or higher will score an additional two points from this scoring card. Each wildlife at the highest elevation for its type across all players will score its player additional points. At player counts three and four there will also be points awarded for second place.

Environment Scoring Cards:

These environment Scoring cards are an optional module. Intended for a greater depth of decisions. The cards are broken into a wildlife, habitat and spatial category. Any one card can be used from a category or all three cards one from each category can be used. 

Setup:

- Place all wildlife tokens in the cloth bag. 
- Place the nature tokens within reach of the players.
- Place the Wildlife Elevation and lake scoring card in the centre of the table.
- Shuffle and reveal one scoring card of each habitat.
- If playing with the environment Scoring cards reveal one or three depending on the player's choice. Don't repeat the type of environment Scoring card.
- Give each player a starting four hexagon tile. 
- Based on player count shuffle and create four stacks of tiles. 43 tiles for two players; 63 for three players and 83 for four.
- Next to each stack of tiles reveal one wildlife token.

How to Play:

In player order players will draft one group of habitat tile and wildlife token (regressing afterwards). 

The player will then proceed to add the tile to their tableau. The tile has to connect to an exisiting tile or be placed on top of two hexagons. The habitat does not have to match. When placing the habitat tile on top it has to be on any two adjacent habitats on the same level. This newly placed tile has to be placed so it is no higher than one elevation of at least one adjacent habitat. The last rule is any habitats that have a wildlife and are placed on top of have to have the same matching wildlife on the new habitat so it can be transferred to the newly placed habitat. 

The wildlife tokens can be placed on any empty habitat that has the matching symbol displayed. This is optional if there is no valid option or no good option the token can be discarded. The habitat tile and the wildlife tokens can be placed in any order. 

The scoring will occur when the habitat tiles run out. The game will last for 20 turns for each player. Each player will then score habitat scoring cards, lakes, wildlife elevation, nature tokens and environment scoring cards.

Final Thoughts:

- More terrain focused instead of wildlife focused when scoring than normal Cascadia. 
- Same drafting mechanism as Cascadia.
- Building tiles higher creating new layers of puzzle, including the challenge that each tile is now two hexagons.
- Similar gameplay as normal Cascadia, but different layers of strategy including elevation of tiles and more terrain focused puzzle.
- Feels like an inbuilt expansion with the environment scoring cards. 
- Mini expansion for the other Cascadia, but would have loved extra wildlife tokens so I could keep this in the other Cascadia box. 

Cascadia has been an evergreen in my collection. It's fast drafting gameplay with interesting decisions on how to balance the habitats and wildlife. So I knew I would be intrigued by Alpine Lakes, however franchises standalone that use the same base mechanic always make me nervous if there is room for both in the collection. I am happy to say I'll be gladly keeping both and awarding Alpine Lakes a Go To Golden Seal. This version is definitely the crunchier version but it doesn't make me decide between the two games. Alpine Lakes feels very different based on two differences to the puzzle. Firstly the puzzle is being built up in layers, creating a different way of puzzling the tiles to create the desired effect. Also this version lets the wildlife take a back seat and instead focuses on the habitat. Don't get me wrong it is still a relevant decision on what wildlife tokens to draft to optimise the puzzle on the player's board. But like the expansion did for Cascadia the focus this time is much more on the habitats themself and how to properly build the desired puzzle. If you are a fan of Cascadia and want more in this engine than I can fully recommend Alpine Lakes, this doesn't replace your copy for Cascadia but instead introduces a new puzzle and different complexity in an already familiar format.