Cascadia is a game of overlapping puzzles—literally and figuratively. It leverages this overlap to create an incredibly satisfying puzzle experience.
In Cascadia, players take turns selecting an animal and tile pairing and adding them to their board. One objective is to create contiguous habitats—connected forests, oceans, and so on. This is easy enough.
Yet, in addition to the 1-2 habitat types that usually feature on a tile, each tile can support a maximum of three types of animals. The animals want to be arranged in certain patterns (long runs for salmon, isolated pairs for bears, giant herds for elk, and so on).
Individually, each of these puzzles would be relatively trivial. Placing them on top of each other, however, adds an incredible layer of complexity. The best moves are those that are a solution to both optimization puzzles at once. They are both rare and rewarding to find.
Dan Cook’s concept of Loops can help us understand why this works so well. An individual game loop consists of action and feedback. The player uses their mental model of the game to take an action, observes how the action is handled by the game rules, updates their mental model based on that feedback, and tries again.
It sounds boring when I write it down mechanistically, but our brains love this. That’s because humans need to learn about and change our environment to survive. So when we interact with a system and see our actions have a meaningful impact on it that is in line with our predictions, our brains release dopamine—and we feel satisfied. Cascadia’s puzzles provide clear, immediate feedback for our actions. We can see when the patterns match up, and when they do, it feels great.
Cascadia also succeeds through overlap in another dimension. The trouble with puzzles, all too frequently, is that progress often occurs in fits and spurts. We wind up spending a lot of time thinking about it and getting frustrated, before eventually grasping the secret and making a ton of progress all at once. This can be incredibly rewarding, but it does require some patience and dedication. There’s an opportunity here for a more relaxing puzzle experience—one Cascadia delivers upon. Cook recommends understanding games by breaking them down into their component loops and arcs. Doing this to Cascadia, I realized just how much its loops are intentionally overlapped and parallelized.
Since players always have three empty tiles with no animal on them, you can often be working towards multiple goals at once—perhaps finding a way to continue a run of salmon and searching for a second bear at the same time. The magic here is that you’re constantly completing goals and embarking upon new ones. By the time you’ve found that second bear, you may have started on a herd of elk, and so on.
Further, there are multiple layers of loop on larger time horizons. In an individual move, you are trying to place a single tile and animal. Over a series of moves you are attempting to create a pattern. Over the course of the game, you are trying to have the largest contiguous forest, plains, etc out of all the players. In this way as well, there is always something to work towards, and always something you can be making progress towards. The result is an incredibly smooth experience for a puzzle game—and one that is perfect to put on some soft music and chill out to.
Finally, a quick aside: is Cascadia a puzzle game? Chris Crawford defines puzzles as games that include challenges but lack conflict. Cascadia does involve conflict, in the form of scores tallied up against other players and compared at the end. However, I think that formal definitions should often be subordinated to the play experience in game design—in games the experience itself is the product. Playing Cascadia feels like solving a puzzle, figuring out just the right way to rotate tiles and arrange animals so everything fits together to maximize your points. So as far as I’m concerned, if it looks like a puzzle and quacks like a puzzle, it’s a puzzle. And an incredibly satisfying one at that.
