Rules Cascadia

Cascadia Scoring Cards Explained: All Five Animals

Bear pairs, elk lines, salmon runs, hawk sight lines and fox neighbours — and which card sets are hardest.

2026-08-09

Cascadia draws one scoring card per animal at setup, and that combination is the game. The same five animals reward completely different shapes depending on which cards came out, which is why the box stays interesting for dozens of plays. Here's what each animal is fundamentally about.

🎯

Quick Answer

Each animal has a fixed theme — bears want groups, elk want lines, salmon want runs, hawks want isolation, foxes want variety. The card variant only changes the specific sizes and point values.

🐻 Bear — Groups

Bears score for forming groups of a specific size, and most variants want pairs: exactly two bears touching each other, with no third bear attached.

The trap is obvious once you've been burned by it — adding a third bear to a scoring pair can destroy the pair entirely rather than improve it. Bears are the animal where you most need to stop placing.

Plan for exact sizes. Leave deliberate gaps so pairs can't accidentally merge.
Most variants cap out. There's usually a maximum number of scoring groups, plus a bonus for reaching it.
Bears are low-volume, high-value. A handful of correct groups outscores a dozen sloppy ones.

🦌 Elk — Lines and Formations

Elk want to be arranged in shapes — usually straight lines of increasing length, with longer lines worth disproportionately more. Some variants reward other formations instead of pure lines.

Elk are the most spatially demanding animal in the game. A line of four is worth far more than two lines of two, so elk placements have to be planned several turns out, and a single tile taken by an opponent can ruin the plan.

🐟 Salmon — Runs

Salmon score for runs: chains of adjacent salmon, longer is better. The defining restriction is that a salmon in a run may not have too many salmon neighbours — the chain has to stay a chain, not become a blob.

In practice that means salmon need room to snake across your landscape. If you clump them, the run breaks and the whole chain can score nothing.

🦅 Hawk — Isolation

Hawks are the opposite of every other animal: they want to be alone. A hawk generally scores only if it has no other hawk adjacent to it. Some variants add line-of-sight scoring, where two isolated hawks looking at each other across a straight line of tiles earn extra.

Hawks are the friendliest animal for beginners because they need no long-term shape — just space. They're also the easiest to over-collect: past a certain point you run out of non-adjacent places to put them.

🦊 Fox — Variety

Foxes score based on the different animals adjacent to them. A fox surrounded by a bear, an elk and a salmon is worth far more than one surrounded by nothing.

Foxes are the great reconcilers of Cascadia. They reward the messy middle of your landscape where several species meet, which means they pair beautifully with an otherwise scattered board. Place them last, into whatever variety you happened to create.

Quick reference: what each animal wants

Animal	Wants	Difficulty to plan
🐻 Bear	Groups of an exact size, usually pairs	Medium — knowing when to stop
🦌 Elk	Lines and formations, longer is better	Hardest — needs turns of setup
🐟 Salmon	Chains that don't clump	Hard — needs open space
🦅 Hawk	No adjacent hawks	Easiest — just spread out
🦊 Fox	Varied animal neighbours	Easy — place late, opportunistically

Which Card Sets Are Hardest?

The difficulty of a game comes from how many animals demand long-term spatial commitment at once. If the elk and salmon cards both want long formations, you're in for a tight, punishing game where picking one to abandon early is usually correct.

Conversely, a setup where hawks and foxes carry big point values is a forgiving, flowing game — both reward reacting to what you're given rather than planning.

For how the animals interact with the terrain half of the scoresheet, see habitat corridors vs wildlife.