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Base price: $XX.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: 15 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter! (Will update link when Kickstarter is live.)
Logged plays: 3
Full disclosure: A preview copy of Cascadia: Rolling Rivers was provided by Flatout Games. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
And today we’re also returning to Cascadia! Very excited to talk more about this, since I am notably a huge fan of the original game (and my review of the expansion is coming in the future). Roll-and-write versions of games are usually pretty interesting to me since they have to rethink so much of their core lest they just feel like a different game with a related theme pasted on. Let’s see how this one holds up!
In Cascadia: Rolling Rivers, you’ve returned to the Pacific Northwest to continue discovering more of the ecosystem. This time, you’re focusing a bit more on the water-adjacent parts of the area. No particular reason; you just like them. With bears, elk, foxes, hawks, and salmon to find, what kind of environment will you create?
Contents
Setup
Not a ton of setup. You’ll place the four Central Dice in the center, and give each player two Personal Dice (one should have a bear on it and the other should have a Hawk / Salmon face).
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Next, give each player a player sheet. There are four, with A being the least complex and D being the most complex. Everyone should use the same sheet type.
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Give each player a Tally Sheet as well, which goes below the player sheet. Once you’ve done that, you can prep for the rest of the game. Shuffle the Habitat Tiers and remove one of each type of each tier, then reshuffle the Habitat Tiers, placing II below I to form a 20-card deck. Draw the first card, placing it to the right of the deck.
Finally, shuffle the Completion Cards and place four, left to right, either above the space for each Habitat Card (if they’re blue Discount Cards) or below the space for each Habitat Card (if they’re brown Bonus Cards). You should be ready to start!
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Gameplay
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I’m going to go somewhat high-level with this one because there are so many different boards and ways to play.
Generally speaking, each round, one player (does not matter who) will roll the central dice, and all players will roll their personal dice. From there, players will choose the animals that they want! You can pick one type of animal, and you gain all the animals pictured of that type from your personal dice and the central dice. Animals have a hierarchy (Bears -> Elk -> Foxes -> Hawks -> Salmon, just like real life), and you can spend 1 Nature Token to convert dice down a tier or 2 Nature Tokens to convert dice up a tier. If you spend 3, you can select dice of up to two types, so that’s nice. As you take animals, add them to your Tally Sheet to keep track.
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After doing that, you can potentially buy a Habitat Card by spending animals equal to the pictured ones. There are potential Discount Cards that you can use to lower the cost and Bonus Cards as a reward for buying them. Once you do, indicate that on your player board following the rules. Some boards will have you write the number, some will let you outline tiles, and some have you even add the specific animals to the board! There’s a lot of different options.
After each round, draw a new Habitat Card and shift the other Habitat Cards to the right, discarding one that would go off the edge of the row of four.
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Play continues until the deck is depleted and you would need to draw a new Habitat Card (twenty rounds). Tally up your points and the player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
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Not any, here! Players don’t directly interact with each other, so there aren’t a lot of major changes from 2 – 4 players. The only thing worth noting is, as usual with these things, everyone has to be done before you can move on, so there may be some slowdown in play commensurate with increasing your player count.
Strategy
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- You do kind of need to consistently be able to get animals. This can be a real doozy if you start having rounds where you’re only pulling one or two animals. Try to use up- or down-converting to cover your bases.
- Try to use the various Completion Cards to your advantage. These can be pretty clutch, especially because you can mess with the activation order of your cards, a bit. Use them to get extra Nature Tokens or certain animals when you need them, or use the discounts to score Habitat Cards for cheap!
- The game has decently high combo potential; you should try to make sure you can use them if your player board supports that kind of thing. There are, in the more complex boards, bonuses that let you check off an additional tile. You can use those to gain more bonuses, to gain more bonuses, and to potentially gain more bonuses. That sort of thing.
- There are a few Completion Cards that support having a ton of Nature Tokens; if those aren’t in play for you, you may not need to keep many (but having a few helps). You may not need nine Nature Tokens at any point in a game (unless you have Discount Cards that rely on them), but having three to five at any time will always ensure you can take advantage of a good turn and not be completely high and dry for the next one.
- Several boards are decently straightforward, so you just kinda want to dig in and score as much as you can. Big numbers are generally good, but whether you go deep on a board or wide on a board can depend on what bonuses and gains the board itself offers.
- Up-converting or down-converting can be helpful, but sometimes you can get more useful stuff by taking two different groups of animals. It really depends on how many animals you have and what’s available on the Habitat Cards. Don’t necessarily assume that you always want to get the most of one animal type.
- Sometimes you’re just going to have a bummer round. Sometimes you roll one of everything. It’s not ideal. Do the best you can.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
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Pros
- Always happy to return to Cascadia! It’s been a favorite game and a deserved Spiel des Jahres winner, so I’m excited that there’s more to do in the world of the game.
- I think this is a pretty interesting roll-and-write adaptation of Cascadia! Especially the D board. The first board is a nice and simple roll-and-write, but I think that there’s a lot to explore in the space! As you increase in complexity the game gets closer to Cascadia, and on the D board, you actually have to place animals in patterns that match existing Cascadia cards! This does a great job of making the game feel authentic to the Cascadia … brand? without just feeling tacked on.
- Beth’s art is always appreciated! It’s always great and it shines here as well. The graphic design is solid, too! The boards are nice and readable and it’s clear how the various cards work just from looking at them.
- There’s a lot of good, interesting combos that can be made. This happens more as you increase in board complexity, but you can have some very nice “play a card to fill in tiles that let you fill in tiles that give you tokens so you can fill in more tiles later”. Players who like combo-heavy play will gravitate to the more complex boards, and I think that’s great.
- There’s a good variety of boards, too. There’s a lot of differences between them! I’ll be interested to see how the board variety changes in Rolling Hills.
- The complexity curve is really nice as well! Spans the “lunch game” level to the “crunchy roll-and-write” level. They really ramp up! I was a bit worried when I played the A board (thought it was too simple), but now that I’ve tried more, I really see how A shines as an introduction to roll-and-write games and the Cascadia: Rolling games. They ramp up quite nicely.
- I appreciate the differences and integrations with the other Rolling series games. I think it’s cool that you can mix and match sets to do what you want! It definitely is to encourage players to get both sets, granted, but I still think it’s a cool idea.
Mehs
- The dice are only so-so; hoping that’s improved quality for the Kickstarter. They’re fine; it’s just not a particularly standout feature and I usually like fancy dice.
- There’s a pretty good amount of spatial reasoning that can happen, which can slow the game down a lot for your first time playing. You can see a lot of the slowdown happen on the D board, as players are getting used to which animals they can play, where they can play them, and how the animals subsequently score. Get ready for a longer first game with the D board, and a gentle recommendation to not start with the D board with new players.
Cons
- I do wish there some level of mitigation for particularly bad dice rolls; this can lead to a pretty intense “feels bad” for the players. It’s a weird thing to put as a negative because it feels like a consequence of poor play, but with dice-driven games there’s always some level of dice luck to everything. It makes players often feel like some choices are out of their hands or, to paraphrase an old Calvin & Hobbes comic, “all I’ve got is foxes“. The up-convert and down-convert are good ways to generally address some dice mitigation, but honestly, sometimes I want a good, old-fashioned reroll.
Overall: 8.75 / 10
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Overall, I think Cascadia: Rolling Rivers is pretty great! I think it’ll be a bit clearer how I feel on the series as a whole after I review Rolling Hills next week, but this is a pretty impressively solid adaptation of Cascadia, which isn’t always the case! There are plenty of times that a “roll-and-write” version of a game is just an entirely different game with the theme loosely pasted on. The nice thing is, Cascadia: Rolling’s variety of player sheets allow you to grow the level of complexity from “somewhat Cascadia-adjacent, but simple” to “a dice-driven analogue of the main game that’s fairly complex spatially”, which I like. I played the A board at lunch and the D board at a game night and they felt like very different experiences of the same game. Presented a nice bit of balance. Plus, I’m never going to be upset with more Beth Sobel art and the graphic design of the game is effortlessly clean. It’s a good-looking game from start to finish. The core loop is pretty simple, even if twenty rounds can seem a little daunting for some players. I do kind of wish the dice were nicer, so I’ll be interested to see how they end up working after the Kickstarter concludes. Who knows. If you’re a solo player, there are even achievements and scenario challenges! A lot of game in the box, but not a lot of game in the sometimes-unfortunate “unnecessary cruft” sort of way; instead, this continues to show the care and expertise that Flatout puts into pretty much every game that they work on! Another great title from a great studio. If you’re looking for a solidly fun roll-and-write, you want to journey again to the Pacific Northwest, or you just want a game with a bear on the cover, Cascadia: Rolling Rivers might be right up your alley! Solidly recommended.
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