Cascadia

Cascadia is the classic AEG family game, the Point Salad of 2021, and I loved it immediately. I enjoyed both its gameplay and its scoring, while the production is very good and its replayability feels meaningful: every game asks you to look at your park a little differently.

There are five animal categories in the game — salmon, hawks, bears, elk, and foxes. During setup, we choose one scoring card for each species from the five or six available, and that card determines which animal formations score points. It might, for example, reward different animals arranged in a line between two hawks.

Players then draft animals and tiles, trying to build the best possible park while meeting the requirements of the chosen cards. The flow is quick, with zero downtime, and interaction mainly lies in the drafting choices: what you take for your own plan and what you leave for everyone else.

It has multiple difficulty levels and plays perfectly well even with young children — though it may be worth skipping habitat scoring at the end. In short, if you are going to buy one friendly go-to game this year, buy Cascadia. It is the obvious choice, and this time the obvious choice is genuinely the right one.