Cascadia Digital’s Daily Trek Mode: A New Puzzle Every Day

October 28, 2024

Cascadia Digital is now available on Steam, Android, and iOS!

Challenges and Solo Scenarios provide tremendous mileage to players who love getting lost in this peaceful habitat-building game, but even if you clear them all, the trail doesn’t end there! The Daily Trek mode provides a new unique scenario every day, ensuring that Cascadia Digital remains as evergreen as the towering pines in the Pacific Northwest.

Every 24 hours, a new Daily Trek appears in Cascadia Digital, presenting a new puzzle with unique rules and scoring modifiers, not so dissimilar from Challenges and Solo Scenarios. But, unlike those modes, Daily Treks are accompanied by a global leaderboard!

Daily Treks are played completely solo, and your final score is measured against players worldwide. Fortunately, you get three attempts to score as high as possible! Your first score will go up to the leaderboard, but if you get a higher score on later attempts, the new score will replace the old one.

However, your score on the Daily Trek isn’t just the points you earned in your game – it also takes into account how well you played according to the unique rules of the challenge.

Let’s take a look at a random example of a Daily Trek scenario:

Each Daily Trek comes with unique rules, scoring modifiers, and three attempts for you to send your highest score to the leaderboards!

In this Daily Trek, there is one simple rule change, and one simple scoring modifier: you can’t have more than two Nature Tokens at a time, and each Fox on a River will grant you additional points towards the challenge.

In other words, if two players had the same exact score at the end of the game with their Habitats and Animal Tokens, but one of them played a few foxes on Rivers and the other didn’t, the former player would end up with a higher score on this Daily Trek.

Here’s where things get tricky: it’s important to play to the Scoring Modifier, but Cascadia is a game about balance, and if you focus too much on the Daily Trek puzzle, you may end up compromising your board!

There are three attempts in the screenshot above — here’s what the highest scoring board ended up looking like:

Notice how there’s only three Foxes in this game — the Daily Trek scoring modifiers only grant a small number of points (in this case, 2 per Fox), and if you focus too hard on the special objective, you may be leaving other points on the table.

This player only placed three Foxes on Rivers, but each of them are scored well according to their Wildlife Scoring Cards, amounting to 19 points total (plus an additional 6 from the Daily Trek bonus). That’s 25 points total; if you were to place a lot more Foxes, but you weren’t scoring them well, it would take nine Foxes to reach the same number of points!

Cascadia is a game that reminds us of the serene harmony of nature, something that’s reflected in its core design, which rewards players with the most well-balanced ecosystems. We wanted to capture the spirit of that in Daily Treks by challenging players to consider that balance carefully when playing for extra points.

Like a long winding trail, the Daily Trek provides new frontiers to explore each day in Cascadia Digital. Start climbing the leaderboards today!

Cascadia Digital is now available on Android, iOS, and Steam. The hiking trail beckons — will you answer the call?