Colorblind Preview: Cascadia

Eternal Blue. Forever Green.

In Cascadia, players place habitat tiles and wildlife tokens to create their own corner of the Pacific Northwest. Each ecosystem is scored based on each animal’s spatial preferences and the size of contiguous habitats. Cascadia is a quick-to-learn, quick-to-play tile layer that elicits the question, “One more game”?

Board games with natural themes rely on the colors of nature – warm browns, reds, and yellows; cool greens and blues. These real-world hues can be challenging for colorblind gamers, so designers and publishers must take care when bringing the great outdoors to the table.

Cascadia continues a lineage of nature-themed games that handle colorblind accessibility well, and designer Randy Flynn described how he considered this balance during design and development:

“For Cascadia, we wanted the player’s final environment to look like a beautiful section of land. [Beth Sobel‘s] artwork really shines, and we wanted players to see it and imagine an actual landscape. We also wanted to ensure the game was accessible to as many people as possible.”

Cascadia will likely be compared with Flatout Games‘ 2019 hit, Calico. Each is a pick-one-place-one tile layer, and both games elegantly balance art, graphic design, and accessibility. “Like Calico, we were really focused on trying to have an accessible experience while also creating a harmonious color palette,” Shawn Stankewich shared.

While Calico relied on double-coding to help players distinguish colors, Randy described a different approach to balancing Cascadia’s art design with accessibility.

“We didn’t want to use the same solution that Calico used, where it put the button icons on every tile. We felt that would distract from the gorgeous landscape. Instead, we worked with Beth to make sure the patterns for the habitat tile art were unique enough on their own that the different habitats were distinct.”

As the team iterated, Shawn described one more tweak to the tiles. “At one point the wetlands and prairies were too close in texture [for colorblind gamers], so we modified so they would be more easily distinguishable.”

Randy also addressed his approach to the wildlife tokens. “We had a lot of color combinations we needed to work well together. In this case we largely rely on the unique wildlife icons to stand out and be unique.”

The end result is a fantastic game where color supports immersion but is not required for gameplay. You could play Cascadia in black-and-white, which reflects the team’s commitment to colorblind accessibility. But you wouldn’t want to, which is a testament to its beauty. I’ve had a great time playing so far, and I highly recommend getting your hands on Cascadia!

Cascadia launches on Kickstarter September 15.

You can follow Randy Flynn on Twitter at rf_seattle. Reach out to Flatout Games on Twitter, Instagram, or their website.

Note: Colorblind Games received a complementary review copy of Cascadia for this preview. The components and final art may change in the final published version.

Images provided by Flatout Games and Randy Flynn