Cascadia

Great game! Sometimes the physical board game can't be set up so this is perfect! Rules, gameplay, controls and vibes of the game are really well put together. Highly recommend!

Couch multiplayer, xbox controllers. wife and daughter love it. will get DLC if any comes out. No achievements for local play though?

A tile-laying board game in which you create landscapes and fill them with various animals, each of which has different requirements for optimal placement. [hr][/hr] This is a digital adaption of the competitive board game of same name. Each player starts with a landscape made up of 3 hexagons containing 5 different biome types. Players take turns expanding their land by adding one of four hexagonal tiles, replacing it with a new tile available to the following players. Tiles can be placed freely, but should ideally be placed in such a way that the biomes on them line up, with each tile being either split into two biomes or containing just a single one. Each tile taken also comes packaged with 1 of 5 animals which must be placed on a piece of land. Each land tile can house exactly one animal and only allows certain types of animals, requiring you to plan ahead, making sure you have a valid spot available. Making this more complicated is the fact that each type of animal has different scoring rules, requiring specific placement relative to other animals to reward you with points. These rules range from simply being placed alongside animals of the same type, to forming different shapes and even aligning with certain other types of animals, making them rather tricky to perfectly fit together. Tiles with only a single biome only ever allow a specific animal to be placed on them, rewarding you with a nature token when you manage to place the animal. These tokens can be spend at any point to draw new animals for the 4 tiles you pick from or to take any of the 4 available animals with any of the 4 tiles, making you more flexible in your placements. Each game goes on for 20 rounds, at which point you score different criteria, with the combined score determining the winner. For the tiles, the size of the largest combined biome of each type is scored, with bonus points being awarded for having the largest and second largest biome of each type among all players. Each type of animal provides points based on its unique scoring condition and any leftover nature tokens are also scored. This simple setup makes for a lot of fun and is kept fresh by the availability of different scoring cards for each animal type, which are randomly chosen at the start of the game. While these vary in how much they change up the standard scoring, the massive number of different combinations results in each game providing a slightly different challenge. There’s also a surprising amount of depth in the game, with experienced players e.g. being able to learn which biomes can house which animals. The regular game can be played with a mix of human and bot players, allowing any player count up to 4 both locally and online. Beyond the solo play mode, there are also different singleplayer modes. First up are solo scenarios, which have fixed scoring cards and different point targets you have to reach as well as the ever-changing daily hike, which provides a similarly fixed scenario and gives you three tries to conquer a leaderboard. For some more elaborate content, there are also challenges, which add more or less broken rule variations to the base game and pits you against bots, with each challenge coming in an easy and a hard version. These modes were quite enjoyable for me, though I believe that the base gameplay is a bit too simplistic and doesn’t get changed enough to keep the experience interesting throughout the completion of all of these. While the gameplay is just as good as in the original board game, this digital version steps it up a lot in regard to presentation, with pretty UI and calming music immersing you from the moment you start the game. The tiles are presented as simple yet pretty three-dimensional landscapes, with small animations and particle effects triggered on interactions making them a joy to place. Sadly, the animals you place are merely flat images, which are warped to give the illusion of motion but feel a bit cheap compared to the rest of the game. Sound-wise, Cascadia isn’t exceptional, with some of the noises created when placing animals in particular being a bit too disruptive for my taste. On the other hand, I felt that the atmospheric music could use a bit more presence. [hr][/hr] With that said, I enjoyed my time with Cascadia and had a lot of fun games with friends. However, a bit more variety in the gameplay. would be welcome.