Cascadia Odds: Reading the Wildlife Bag

Welcome to Level 3. At Level 2 you learned to lay landing spots and read the display. Now you put numbers on the part of Cascadia that feels like luck: the cloth bag.

The bag is not a mystery. It starts with exactly 100 wildlife tokens, 20 of each animal. Tokens that land on environments leave it for good. Tokens that are wiped or returned go back in. That means anyone at the table can work out, roughly, what is left. All the odds below are worked out from those real counts.

Overpopulation is rarer than it feels

When four fresh tokens come out of a full bag:

So a four-of-a-kind wipe is rare, about once in every 160 fresh displays. Three of a kind is common enough to plan around, about one fresh display in nine. In play, only one or two tokens change each turn, so these numbers are a guide, not a promise, but they show the shape of it.

Will a wipe bring your animal?

When you wipe tokens, the new ones come from the bag as it is now. The chance that at least one of them is the animal you want depends on two numbers: how many of your animal are still in the bag, and how many tokens are in the bag in total.

Two lessons hide in the table:

• The share matters, not the count. Twelve salmon in sixty tokens is about as likely as twenty in a hundred.
• A three-token wipe is about a coin flip at an average share, and much worse when your animal is scarce. A nature token spent on a wipe for a scarce animal is often wasted.

How to count the bag

You do not need an exact count. You need a rough one.

1. Count your animal on every environment. It is all in plain view.
2. Add the ones in the display. They are out of the bag too.
3. Subtract from 20. That is roughly what is left in the bag.
4. Estimate the bag’s size. At the start it holds 96 after the display is filled. Each player places at most one token a turn, so in a four-player game the bag shrinks by up to four tokens per round.

Then compare your animal’s share with one fifth. Above one fifth, your animal is more common than average. Below it, scarce.

Scarcity shapes the late game

In a four-player game, up to 80 tokens can land on environments. If three players chase salmon, most of the twenty can be gone well before the last round, and the last few will be fought over. In a two-player game, at most 40 tokens are placed, so the bag stays fuller and scarcity matters less.

This is why the midgame lesson told you to lean toward the animals the table ignores. Now you can check it with a count instead of a feeling.

Returned tokens refill the bag

Any token a player declines goes back in the bag. So does every token wiped by overpopulation or a nature token. Late in a game, if players keep returning bears they cannot use, bears become more common in the bag, not less. Watch for it.

Put the odds to work

Say you need one salmon to finish a run of five, and you have three turns left. Seven salmon sit on environments and two in the display, so about 11 remain, in a bag of about 40. That is a share above one quarter.

• If a salmon is in the display now, take it. The odds will not get better than certainty.
• If none is, a nature token wipe of all four tokens has about a 74% chance to bring one, from the same counting.
• If the run’s last landing spot could also hold a hawk you need, keep both options open, and let the bag decide.

You will not run these numbers every turn. Run them for the one or two animals your game depends on. After a few games, a glance at the environments will tell you whether waiting is wise.