Game Designer Talks Exciting Features Of Cascadia Alpine Lakes

The game "Cascadia" was first published in 2021 after a successful Kickstarter campaign. Over 9,000 people backed the original game, getting it off to a good start. The game became a hit pretty much overnight, and a year later won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award in 2022. After a successful kids version, "Cascadia Junior," and an expansion, "Cascadia: Landmarks," and two roll-and-write games, a new game in the Cascadia family launched on Kickstarter on Tuesday, October 14th.

"Cascadia: Alpine Lakes" is a standalone game that continues the "Cascadia" journey. Designer Randy Flynn joined gaming expert William Pankratz and me on Table Talk (WJON's bi-weekly show about board gaming) this week to chat more about "Cascadia: Alpine Lakes."

Flynn says Alphine Lakes has been a standing idea he has been working on since about 2021, after he developed the original game for Flatout Games.  The new double hex tiles in Alpine Lakes let players stack the habitat tiles and go 3-D, for new scoring conditions. Flynn says the layering brings a whole new twist to the game:

"The double hex tiles change how the stacking works, like what are the trade-offs and what mess can you make for yourself, where you can't back up, that actually matter, or should you go somewhere else, so I think it makes it very dynamic in the stacking."

He says Alpine Lakes does keep a bunch of the core rules from "Cascadia," like the way players obtain tiles and tokens, the way you earn nature tokens, and the scoring cards, so Alpine Lakes will be easy for Cascadia fans to jump right into.

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Flynn also spoke to us about working with Beth Sobel on the art design again and how he chose the animals and habitats for "Cascadia: Alpine Lakes."  He says one of the animals has always been a favorite of his:

"Marmots are like one of my favorite animals in the mountains out here and that was like, why someone was like, why are there two rodents, there actually aren't, but none the less marmots are rodents but I said well you can blame me for that, that was like the one animal I was not going to comprimise on that had to be in the game."

He says cougars were actually in the original game, but at one point were replaced by elk, and he wanted to bring those back as well. Flynn provided us with loads of insight into the development of Cascadia: Alpine Lakes and the original Cascadia. Follow the Cascadia: Alpine Lakes' link to the Kickstarter campaign and find out more, and back the project.

William told us about new games hitting the shelves over the last two weeks as well like "Vivo" and "Whoa There Cowboy." You can catch Table Talk every other Saturday, opposite the Woods Garden Show, in the 8:00 a.m. hour after the news for more board game fun.

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