Cascadia: Alpine Lakes — hexagon dominoes that let you build up! (SPIEL Essen 2026)

About Cascadia: Alpine Lakes, from BoardGameGeek:

Cascadia: Alpine Lakes is a standalone follow-up to the hit spatial puzzle game Cascadia! In this puzzly tile-layering game, players continue the journey started in Cascadia to create the most diverse Pacific Northwest environment as they draft new double-hexagon habitat tiles and unique new wildlife tokens to build out - and up - their beautiful landscape mosaic. Each game of Cascadia: Alpine Lakes features unique combinations of scoring objectives linked to how the five wildlife species are arranged across three different alpine habitats. Players also score for how well surrounded and elevated their lakes and wildlife are. Habitat and environment scoring cards add unique scoring conditions so that each game provides a new spatial challenge with thousands of possible combinations. Turns are simple: Choose a habitat tile and wildlife token pair, then place them into your expanding environment. This time, each habitat tile is a double-hexagon and tiles can be stacked. Many of the core game mechanisms are similar to Cascadia, but the twist is that each habitat scores in different ways and your environment is now a three-dimensional spatial puzzle with new stacking and adjacency challenges.