Cascadero Board Game Review

Dr. Reiner Knizia might not be a household name, but it’s one of the most recognizable monikers in board gaming, thanks to his astonishingly prolific career, peppered with highly acclaimed titles like auction classic Ra, heavyweight tile-layer Tigris & Euphrates and other great board games for adults. In recent years, the good doctor has slowed the pace of hits a little, but he still pops up with the goods from time to time, such as 2021’s Witchstone. Cascadero is his newest fare, and the big question is whether it’ll measure up to those big Knizia titles of yesteryear.

Cascadero comes in a worryingly slimline box, but the rich and vibrant cover art by Ian O’Toole, depicting a medieval messenger on a rearing horse, should allay any concerns about the quality of the contents. And once that lid slides off, any lingering doubts should vanish as the tray is packed with high-quality goodies.

There’s a bright fold-out, double-sided board with artwork to match the box cover, and a sheet of plain punch-out hex counters which is used on one of that board’s sides to play a variant. Some people might find the mix of vibrant player colors and muted background a little garish and others might find it affects readability a little, but these are minor complaints.

The rest of the components are wooden. Each of four player colors comes with a troop of little figures on horseback, and a bunting of flags to mark scoring achievements on the board. There’s also a bag of fake wax seals, resplendent in red and gold. Everything is neat, and nicely cut, and while it won’t win over folk who want legions of super-detailed miniatures on their tables, it’s great visual design in the European gaming tradition.

Like most Knizia titles, Cascadero has a theme that can rapidly be tossed aside to reveal an engaging semi-abstract design beneath. In this instance, you are placing messengers onto a hex grid studded with towns, trying to win the inhabitants over to the glorious reign of El Cascadero, the new ruler. But the townsfolk are suspicious, and will only listen to messengers who travel in groups. In game terms, this means that you get to score if you place a messenger piece next to a town, and it forms a group of at least two pieces of your color.

But there’s a catch. You can only score if it’s not only a group of two, but also if no other members of that group were adjacent to that town before. In other words, if you place one piece next to a town, it does nothing and if you then place a second piece next to the same town, it still does nothing. The initial piece of your group can’t be adjacent to the town you want to score.

While there are obvious reasons for this – it’d be impossible to track whether you’d scored a town before, otherwise – it also offers the first deliciously painful edge to dig into your decision-making. That board is pretty cramped. Aside for a few edge hexes, it’s hard to put a piece down that’s not immediately adjacent to a town, and that in itself is inefficient as you can’t then score it, only use it as a launchpad for neighboring towns.

Why is this important? Because the towns come in different colors, and scoring one will advance your token on the matching scoring track. The number of spaces you climb depends on the situation. One space if it’s the first piece to make contact with the town, two if there are other messengers already adjacent to the town and three if the town contains a herald, marked on the board by a star icon. Four of the scoring tracks offer the same bonuses, while the fifth, white, has extra goodies to snaffle. The catch is that you need to advance the track that matches your player color to the top space in order to be in with a chance of winning.

Remember how that board is cramped? Well, now you have additional dilemmas in deciding where to place your one precious piece each turn. Because you get a bonus space on the scoring track if there’s already a messenger adjacent to the town, pieces you put down that don’t score yourself aren’t merely inefficient, they’re a positive boon to your opponents. Not only that, but all of you will be champing at the bit to claim scarce territory around those herald towns, and those of your own player color, and so it’s a race to get them, but it’s also a race where every step gifts your enemies with possible scoring opportunities, while you try and digest this endless stack of problems and your eyes turn to saucers just thinking about it.

Yet there’s more. Moving up a scoring track doesn’t necessarily score you any points. There are other bonuses to net on your climb, from extra turns, to extra spaces on the track, to moving one of your pieces to a new board space. You can also gain seals, which are extremely useful as they allow a single piece to count as two, meaning you can score a town with one placement. But you can only get these if you land exactly on the matching space, not if you skip up by two or three, adding another headache to deal with as you plot your moves.

You might imagine that the dynamic, interactive nature of play, where you’re all jostling for position while trying not to let each other score, would make this chiefly a game of tactics rather than a strategy board game. But thanks to those bonuses on the scoring track, that’s not the case. When you gain extra on-board moves or on-track spaces, if you’re well set up, it can trigger a cascade of scoring opportunities as one advancement earns a free one, which earns a free move, which earns another free advancement and so on. These chains can be absolutely devastating if you’ve planned and timed it right, letting you bag a majority of those precious seals, or score the big points by closing off an achievement.

That’s right: while you can earn points on the tracks, the bigger payouts are available for being the first to reach certain milestones, such as connecting all five colors of town with a single group, or being the first to the top of a given track. There are less high-pressure goals for connecting two matching color towns with a group, which anyone can earn at any time, with a fat ten points extra if you do this with all five colors. But remember: unless you reach the top of your own color scoring track, it doesn’t matter how many points you have as the victory will go to the high-scoring player who has, making denial of scoring opportunities a valid and punishing end game strategy.

All this goodness, and we haven’t even mentioned the included variants. The advanced version allows you to move those important heralds each time they’re scored, creating an even more pressured race environment as you look to corner those bonuses for yourself. And there’s the farmer variant, where you flip the board, replacing some cities with a random placement of farmer tiles that earn you similar rewards to the scoring tracks. This results in a much more varied and cerebral experience. The striking thing is that each of the three ways to play is clearly the same game, but each feels like it has its own style and approach, offering three distinct challenges to master.