Rules Cascadia

How to Play Cascadia: Complete Rules for New Players

Tile and token drafting, placement rules, and the two ways a turn can go wrong.

Cascadia has one of the shortest rulebooks of any Spiel des Jahres winner. You take a tile, you take an animal, you place both. That's the game. The depth is entirely in where, and this guide covers everything you need before your first play.

🎯
Quick Answer

On your turn take one of four tile-and-token pairs, add the tile to your landscape, and place the animal on a matching slot. Score wildlife patterns, habitat corridors and leftover nature tokens at the end.

👥 Players 1–4
⏱️ Time 30–45 min
🔁 Turns each 20
🏆 Award Spiel des Jahres 2022

The Two Halves of the Game

Everything in Cascadia is either a habitat or a wildlife. Keeping them straight in your head makes the rest of the rules obvious.

🏔️ Five habitats (on tiles)

  • • Mountains
  • • Forests
  • • Prairies
  • • Wetlands
  • • Rivers

🐻 Five wildlife (tokens)

  • • Bear
  • • Elk
  • • Salmon
  • • Hawk
  • • Fox

Setup

Getting to the first turn

1

Give everyone a starter

Each player takes a three-tile starter arrangement and places it in front of them. This is the seed of your landscape.
2

Draw one scoring card per animal

There are several scoring card variants for each of the five animals. Draw one for each — this combination defines how wildlife scores this game, and it changes every session.
3

Build the display

Lay out four habitat tiles in a row and draw four wildlife tokens from the bag, pairing one token with each tile.
4

Nature tokens to one side

Keep the pinecone-shaped nature tokens in a shared supply. You'll earn them during play.

Taking a Turn

Turns are fast and always the same shape.

Your turn, every turn

1

Choose a pair

Take one of the four tile-and-token pairs from the display. You take both — the tile and the animal paired with it.
2

Place the tile

Add it to your landscape so it touches at least one tile you already have. There is no grid to fill and no shape to respect — your landscape grows organically.
3

Place the animal

Every tile shows one to three wildlife symbols. Put your token on any empty tile in your landscape whose symbols include that animal. It doesn't have to be the tile you just placed.
4

Refill the display

Draw a new tile and a new token to bring the display back to four pairs.

Nature Tokens

Some tiles are keystone tiles — they show a single wildlife symbol. Place the matching animal on one and you immediately earn a nature token.

Spend a nature token at any point on your turn to do one of two things:

  • Break the pairing. Take any tile from the display with any token from the display, in whatever combination you like.
  • Cull the wildlife. Discard any number of tokens from the display and draw replacements.

Each unspent nature token is worth one point at the end, so every spend is a real trade-off. When to spend them is one of the genuine skills of the game.

Ending the Game and Scoring

The game ends after each player has taken 20 turns. Then you score three things:

WILDLIFE

Score each animal by its card

Every animal scores by the pattern on the card drawn during setup — pairs, lines, groups, or positions relative to other animals. This is usually the bigger half of your score. All five explained here.

HABITAT

Largest corridor of each habitat

For each of the five habitat types, count your biggest connected group of that terrain. You score points for its size, plus a bonus if yours is the largest at the table.

NATURE

One point per unspent token

Straightforward, and frequently the margin in a close game.

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