In Cascadia, players each cultivate their own wildlife area. Each turn, you draft one of four pairings of pieces, each pair containing a hex-shaped terrain tile (with five different types of terrains) and a wooden disc showing an animal (one of five different kinds). You place the terrain in your landscape; you don't have to link matching terrain types together, though there are incentives to do so. At the same time, you place the animal on any empty tile in your landscape that shows that animal's icon.
All scoring in Cascadia takes place at the end of the game. Each of the five animal types has a particular way you should arrange it to maximize scoring. (And the game comes with multiple cards showing different scoring conditions for each animal. Each game is different, depending on the randomly selected scoring conditions on offer.) You also then score for your largest contiguous area of each terrain type (with a special bonus if yours is the largest among all players). There are a few other wrinkles in the drafting, but that's essentially all there is to it.
The system isn't too complicated, but it is robust enough to put several competing considerations into your decision making. You only ever have three empty spaces for animals, so trying to keep your options wide can be important. But there are a limited number of each kind of animal in each game, so if your opponents are going for one in particular, you might do well to shift your plans to something in less demand (that you'll be able to draft more regularly). Finding a harmony between the scoring methods of two or three different animals at the same time is a thematic and satisfying way to maximize your score.
I'm not alone in noting this, but to me, a lot of the strategy and analysis in Cascadia is similar to what you're asked to do in Calico: you've got a spatial puzzle to solve using hex tiles, and you're drafting against your opponents to do it. There are some differences here that do matter -- though there is more credence than usual to the community opinion that "these two games are a lot alike." If you're a fan of these sorts of tile laying games, you'll probably enjoy both Cascadia and Calico. But also, I think most gamers would have a preference between the two, depending on a few considerations.
It feels a lot easier to me to "keep your options open" in Cascadia. There are a lot of ways to score. Your board is always changing and isn't "fixed" from the start of the game. Four choices to draft from on each turn is simply, strictly more forgiving than the three choices you're given in a turn of Calico. And all of that adds up to many gamers declaring that Cascadia was a "Calico killer"; Calico came first and was a hit, but then along came Cascadia to consign it to the shelf. On the other hand, you could view all of Cascadia's options through an opposite lens: in being more flexible, you come into conflict with opponents less often. You can more easily "draft your way out" of a problem. The game can be more solitary, with little-to-nothing your opponents do actually disrupting your game.
I think either view probably overstates the case, as both are good games. The designer in me admires the more elegant system of Calico. I can easily imagine other people being more drawn to Cascadia's variable scoring conditions and the emergent interactions they create. I'd gladly play either on a game night, but if I'm the one making the suggestion, I'll pick Calico. Still, I'd rate Cascadia at least a B... and as we've been playing it more, I think it has been growing on me. Fans of drafting or tile-laying games should give it a look.
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