Our latest interview in a new series, Why You Should Kickstart Cascadia. Questions from the creators answered. Cascadia is a board game that is a mixture of many wonderful things in a beautiful package, launching on Kickstarter September 15, 2020. The game is brought to you by a team behind games such as Calico, Truffle Shuffle and Point Salad. Check out the link below to go directly to the Cascadia Board Game Kickstarter page or continue on to read the interview with the designers.
Cascadia on Kickstarter
1. How would you describe your product in 2 sentences?
Cascadia is a puzzly tile-laying game for the whole family! In Cascadia, players attempt to build the most harmonious ecosystem by drafting habitat tiles and wildlife tokens and completing a dual-layer spatial puzzle.
2. Who is the team bringing this to market? What is your background that brought you to launching this?
Cascadia was designed by Randy Flynn. Randy pitched the original game concept to Flatout Games just over a year ago and at that point Flatout Games created a CoLab team to bring Cascadia to life. The CoLab is a group of people brought together to make the game a reality – to assist in all aspects of design, development, and publishing.
The team consists of the founding members of Flatout Games: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, and Shawn Stankewich (who manage the project and assist with everything from marketing to fulfillment); as well as Dylan Mangini (graphic design), Kevin Russ (development, marketing and graphic design), and David Iezzi (development). Everyone on the team was part of our previous CoLab team for Calico, so we brought Randy into the fold this time, and set out to make another great puzzly tile-laying game!
We are all lovers of board games and have all done some aspect of board game design and development, so the team has a broad array of perspectives, but a lot of experience in designing games.
3. What existing games would you compare your game to?
Cascadia is a dual-layer puzzle that utilizes a pool drafting mechanism where players must select a group of things to draft that may not be ideal together. Other examples of pool drafting are bidding games like Medici. The simple pick-and-play drafting is similar to our previous game Calico, since it has similarly simple rules.
The landscape building in the game is similar to games like Carcassonne and Kingdomino, while the variable scoring is similar to a game like Tiny Towns. There are a lot of simple mechanisms that we feel come together really well to make this feel similarly elegant to a lot of these modern classic gateway games.
4. What sets your game apart?
The aspect that sets Cascadia apart is the ratio of rules-ease to strategic depth. This is what we strive for at Flatout Games. I can teach you the rules to Cascadia in just a few short minutes, but there are hundreds of different puzzles that can be solved – each new game will present a unique combination of challenges. The fact that it is a game that gamers will love sharing with their friends because it is so friendly to new gamers, while still being really thinky and satisfying is what we think sets the game apart from others!
5. How can everyone be assured that they are going to get quality components and you are going to deliver on all the promises you are making?
This year we delivered our very first game, Calico, to over 6000 backers. The game has been praised for the quality of components and we take great pride in the overall product that we are delivering. We are very excited with the baseline quality of Cascadia, but if we hit some stretch goals during our campaign we will be able to pack in even more value for our backers!
6. Why should someone back your project?
We are a really small company. No full-time employees. We do this for the love of making amazing games, and we’re really focused on doing things in a way that puts backers at the forefront! We are extremely engaged with our backers and do everything that we can to improve the backer experience.
What we lack in size and experience, we believe we make up for in passion and dedication to the people who will (hopefully!) make our games possible. We loved this game so much that we all have poured hundreds of hours of our own time into this passion project – we think it’s an amazing game experience and we’re really excited to share the journey of making it with anyone who is interested!
Well we are satisfied!
Great insight and enthusiasm from a passionate team. The game seems very unique and not exactly like anything out there. It has clearly been guided by professional hands and looks like it is going to be a top-notch product. It is always great to see a product at this quality level. Take a look at their Kickstarter, website or social media pages for more info!
Surprised that the gorgeous art of Beth Sobel was not mentioned in this interview. It’s a huge factor in why many people (including myself) will back Cascadia!
We hear you!! The pictures say the words so much better than we could. What a beautiful game!!