Challenges and Solo Scenarios in Cascadia Digital

Challenges and Solo Scenarios in Cascadia Digital

We’re happy to announce that Cascadia Digital is releasing on Steam Early Access on October 30th! 

Cascadia, by Flatout Games from designer Randy Flynn, has quickly become a modern tabletop classic, earning the iconic Spiel des Jahres award in 2022. Praised for its elegant simplicity that’s easy to learn but difficult to master, we’re excited to bring the Pacific Northwest puzzler to life in digital form.

As we draw closer to the Early Access release on Monday, we invite you to join us on the Hiking Trail, a series of preview articles where we’ll be taking a closer look at what awaits players in Cascadia Digital.  In today’s article, we’ll be looking at the game’s Challenges and Solo Scenarios!

The Hiking Trail – Previews of Cascadia Digital

Challenges and Solo Scenarios in Cascadia Digital

At the heart of Cascadia is a puzzle – players must place their animals in different formations to maximize point gain, but the conditions for scoring change from game to game, providing a fresh new challenge every time it comes to the table. 

This is the essence of Cascadia, and it’s something we wanted to honor in bringing the game to life in digital form. Let’s take a look at Challenges and Solo Scenarios in Cascadia Digital, and how they capture the spirit of the puzzle-like experience in the tabletop original.

If you’ve played any of our other digital tabletop adaptations, you know about Challenges!  Challenges twist the rules, adding new elements to a game that you must navigate to win the scenario.  In Cascadia Digital, each of the 14 Challenges also comes equipped with an Expert variant, resulting in 28 scenarios that will put the skills of even experienced players to the test.

There are 14 Challenges in Cascadia Digital, each with a Normal and an Expert version. Can you beat them all?


Some Challenges change the game only slightly, allowing for a mostly traditional experience, but with one extra hitch that players have to account for in their strategy. In the Challenge Mega Biomes, you can only place tiles when they match with adjacent habitats. Entrenched Ecosystem, on the other hand, requires you to spend two Nature Tokens instead of one every time you use them. These conditions don’t significantly alter the game, but they do provide for an additional level of difficulty.

Challenges like Hungry Bears will demand unconventional strategies. This scenario allows you to remove animals off the board, introducing new strategic options that you wouldn’t have in a normal game of Cascadia!


Meanwhile, other Challenges will make much more unconventional changes. Take Hungry Bears for example – in this scenario, you will remove all adjacent salmon when you place a bear, scoring points for each one. Meanwhile, Diverse Biomes challenges everything you know about Cascadia by forbidding you to place matching habitats on the board. These games will play out completely differently from what you’re used to, providing an entirely new variety of experiences for seasoned players!

Challenges will always have a visible reminder of the unique goals and conditions in the scenario you’re playing.

Expert Mode

Additionally, all Challenges are accompanied by an Expert variant, which unlocks after you’ve beaten the base Challenge, and tweaks the rules of the base Challenge to make it even more difficult than the last. 

In the Normal version of Grand Vistas, your habitats will only score if they have five tiles or more, but in the Expert version, that number jumps to seven. With only 20 tiles to place each game, this has significant ramifications on the way you might approach your strategy. While building most of your habitats to 5+ tiles is fairly achievable, you don’t have a lot of room for multiple 7+ tile habitats — this creates a situation where you have to be very tactical about which habitats to focus on and which to ignore.

The Expert version of the Grand Vistas Challenge changes the minimum habitat scoring threshold from five tiles to seven. On paper this may not seem like a big change, but with the limited number of tiles you’re able to place in a match, it makes the game much tighter than you might expect!


Some Expert Challenges change things up a bit more, and we can look at the aforementioned Hungry Bears as an example. The base Challenge has bears eating all adjacent salmon when they’re placed, scoring 3 points for each one. But in the Expert version, you will remove all adjacent non-bear wildlife, scoring 15 points if you remove four or more with one single placement. In both versions, you will have to make some significant changes to your usual play style!

With its meditative puzzle-like design, the tabletop version of Cascadia is widely praised for its solo gameplay, with 15 Solo Scenarios baked right into the rulebook. Unlike Challenges, which pit you against AI players, Solo Scenarios play with Solo Rules, which means you have no opponents and you instead need to reach a certain point threshold to win. But in addition to that, Solo Scenarios also introduce unique objectives and win conditions which will keep even experienced players on their toes!

These Solo Scenarios lend themselves particularly well to digital play, and in Cascadia Digital, we’ve included all 15 of them exactly as they are in the tabletop version of the game.

No need to worry about keeping track of all your points – the objectives are always shown in the top left corner, and they will update when you clear them!


Solo Scenarios don’t change the rules quite as much as Challenges do, but they do provide unique winning conditions, and they get increasingly more difficult if you play them in order. While Solo Scenario 1 only requires you to reach 80 points with the “A” Wildlife Scoring Cards, Solo Scenario 13 (pictured above) challenges you to reach 100 points, fully score Elk at least once, place at least five Hawks, and it requires Hawks and Elk to be placed adjacent to each other!

Each Solo Scenario has a point threshold you need to reach for victory, and they may include extra objectives as well! 


You’re not required to play the Solo Scenarios in order, but if you do, the experience isn’t unlike hiking up a mountain peak – getting gradually harder and harder the further up you go, but incredibly rewarding once you’ve reached the top!

Challenges and Solo Scenarios will provide plenty of mileage for dedicated players, but there’s more that awaits you in Cascadia Digital when it releases on Steam Early Access on October 30th! In our next preview, we’ll be taking a look at Daily Treks, a special mode unique to Cascadia Digital. Join us on the hiking trail!

The Hiking Trail – Previews of Cascadia Digital


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