Road to SPIEL 2026: Cascadia: Alpine Lakes by AEG / Flatout Games

Cascadia: Alpine Lakes is the standalone follow-up to 2022’s Spiel des Jahres winner cascadia, taking the familiar combination of habitat building and wildlife placement into the mountains, and adding a third dimension to the puzzle.

Published by Flatout Games and Aklderac Entertainment Group (AEG), it is designed by Randy Flynn, Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin and Shawn Stankewich, with artwork by Beth Sobel and graphic design by Dylan Mangini. The game plays for 1-4 players, ages 10+, taking around 30-45 minutes to complete.

What is it?

The original Cascadia asked players to create an interconnected Pacific Northwest ecosystem while simultaneously arranging bears, elks, salmon, foxes and hawks into particular scoring patterns. It was an elegantly simple idea that proved enormously successful, even going on to win the Spiel des Jahres in 2022.

Alpine Lakes keeps the central puzzle, but moves into higher country. Instead of single hexagonal habitat tiles, players now draft double-hex tiles representing three alpint environments. What’s more, those tiles don’t always have to sit flat on the table. They can be stacked.

Your landscape, therefore, can grow vertically as well as horizontally, creating elevated habitats, mountain terrain, and secluded lakes as the game progresses.

Despite the familiar name this is not an expansion, but is a standalone game in its own right with everything needed to play in the box.

How does it play?

Anyone familiar with Cascadia will recognise the basic turn immediately.

Players choose a paired habitat tile and wildlife token from the available selection, add the tile to their growing environment and then place the animal into a suitable habitat.

The major difference is that every habitat tile now contains two hexes, and tiles can be layered over those already placed in your landscape. Suddenly adjacency isn’t the only consideration for the players, elevation now matters too.

The five wildlife species still have their own scoring objectives, but Alpine Lakes adds scoring for the landscape itself. Lakes reward careful placement and surrounding terrain, wildlife can benefit from elevation, and different habitat and environmental cards alter how particular features score from game to game. There are literally thousands of possible combinations of scoring conditions, and the game now leaves you solving several puzzles simultaneously.

Where does the tile fit?

Which animal so I need?

Should I extend the landscape, or place another layer on top of it?

At the end, the player who has best balanced wildlife patterns, habitats, lakes and elevation takes the victory.

Why we’re watching it

Well, for starters it’s the follow-up to a previous Spiel des Jahres winner so that will always create a buzz of excitement and expectation.

Following Cascadia was always going to be tricky. The original succeeded partly because it did remarkably little… draft a tile and an animal, place them, try to both both halves of the puzzle work together. Adding more mechanisms could easily undermine that simplicity.

One of the things that makes Alpine Lakes interesting is that the central change is very easy to understand: the landscape now has height. While that one addition potentially alters almost every placement decision, it does so without changing the basic turn strcture that made the original game so approachable.

The game is also still firmly aimed at families as well as hobby gamers, with the run time for a complete game between 30-45 minutes and an ages 10+ suggestion.

Cascadia: Alpine Lakes was originally funded on Kickstarter, with almost 8,000 backers raising $365,910 on a project that initially had an $8,000 target.

The Game at SPIEL Essen 2026

Unlike many of the games in our Road to SPIEL series, Cascadia: Alpine Lakes is beginning to reach shops before Essen. Indeed UK stores should start receiving copies this week (week beginning 5th October 2026). So this isn’t an Essen premiere, but the show will be the game’s first major outing and also the first opportunity for many to see and play the game. It is also exoected to be one of the major family-games being showcased at this years show.

You will be able to find copies of the game on AEG’s stand, will can be found at Hall 3, Stand B200.

SPIEL Essen runs from 22nd-25th October 2026.

Cascadia: Alpine Lakes at a glance

Publisher: Flatout Games / Alderac Entertainment Group

Designers: Randy Flynn, Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin & Shawn Stankewich

Artists: Beth Sobel

Players: 1-4

Ages: 10+

Playing Time: 30-45+ minutes

Type: Tile drafting / tile placement / pattern building / spatial puzzle

Engish Edition: Yes

Expected retail release: Beginning to reach retailers in early October

SPIEL: AEG - Hall 3, Stand B200

More information: AEG - Cascadia: Alpine Lakes

Tomorrow on Road to SPIEL 2026: Nakasendo - travellers brave mountains, forests, snow and the occasional bear while constructing the historic road between Edo and Kyoto.