Cascadia: Alpine Lakes is a standalone follow-up to the 2022 Spiel des Jahres winner Cascadia. Designed by Randy Flynn and illustrated by Beth Sobel, Cascadia: Alpine Lakes continues the journey to create a diverse environment of habitats and wildlife in the Pacific Northwest.
Gameplay
Players of Cascadia will recognize much about this puzzly tile-layering game, drafting a matched pair of a habitat tile (now a double-hexagon shape) and wildlife token (new animals!) to build their landscape. This time, players can stack tiles on top of each other, transforming environments into a three-dimensional spatial puzzle.
Many core mechanisms are similar to Cascadia, with some additions and changes. Each play of Cascadia: Alpine Lakes features unique combinations that include the following scoring opportunities:
- Objectives linked to the arrangement of wildlife species across habitats (forest, glacier, and meadow)
- New lakes that score bonuses if elevated and surrounded by habitats
- Wildlife on elevated habitat tiles
- Additional environment scoring cards focused on habitats, wildlife, and spatial arrangements
The design team balanced introducing new mechanisms by simplifying the others to avoid overwhelm. Habitats were reduced from five in Cascadia to three in Alpine Lakes, and instead of wildlife-specific scoring objectives that can cross habitats, wildlife are scored only within one of the three habitat types: forest, glacier, or meadow.
SolO Gameplay
I found solo play for Cascadia: Alpine Lakes familiar and easy to learn. It employs the same conveyor belt and “beat your own score” mechanisms as most Flatout Games solo modes, which is serviceable, but not exciting. The industry has evolved solo play beyond this method, including an “Automa-style” solo opponent that replicates a human player. I’m hopeful that Flatout Games will incorporate new creative ideas into future solo modes.
Accessibility
I’ve had the pleasure of previewing Cascadia, Cascadia: Rolling (Hills and Rivers), and now Cascadia: Alpine Lakes. The Flatout Games team has accommodated the needs of low vision and colorblind players quite well in this game, improving upon the excellent visual accessibility of previous Cascadia titles.
Tiles and Tokens
The primary components of Cascadia: Alpine Lakes are the habitat hex tiles and wildlife tokens. The tiles introduce an accessibility improvement over the original game, which included five habitat types (Mountain, Forest, Prairie, Wetland, and River). While playing Cascadia, I sometimes needed a second look to ensure I could discern Westland and Prairie from one another, as they looked close to the same to me.
Habitats in Alpine Lakes are reduced to just three: Forest, Glacier, and Meadow. This provides a more easily distinguishable set of hex tiles for colorblind players. Additionally, the wildlife token icons are shown in full (instead of just colors), and “keystone” hexes include both a pine cone icon and a triangle for clarity.
Wildlife tiles are great, as usual. And as usual, I wish the animal art were printed on both sides, so I didn’t have to flip half the tokens after pulling them from the bag.
Cards
The game’s scoring cards are quite good, with clear icons and text. I appreciate the graphical version of the scoring criteria, coupled with a full-text description. Some low-vision gamers may struggle with the Glacier cards, though, which (in the prototype version) have relatively low contrast—white text on a light blue-grey background.
Adjusting the background to a darker value, while keeping the same hue, could make the white text easier to read.
Conclusion
Cascadia: Alpine Lakes is a worthy addition to the Cascadia series, and like previous titles, it does a very good job accommodating colorblind and low-vision players’ needs!
The Kickstarter campaign launches on October 14, 2025. If you’re reading this later, go to the Flatout Games website to learn more!
- Colorblind Games received a pre-release prototype copy from the publisher for this preview. The published version may include changes to components.
- I have served as a volunteer playtester and rules editor for several Flatout Games titles, including the original Cascadia (see About Me for details).
- Image Credits: Box art: Flatout Games. All others: Brian Chandler.
Colorblind Games 