Harmonies Board Game First Impressions

Harmonies gives players the opportunity to build a world and fill it with animals!

Well, wooden bits and cubes but you know what I mean.

Build landscapes by placing coloured tokens and creating habitats for your animals.

Harmonies Game Overview

Quick Rules Summary

So there is a board with 5 spaces and each has 3 tokens representing land types randomly placed on them.

On a player’s turn, they take one group of 3 tokens from that board and place them anywhere on their player board. They can also be stacked on top of each other.

Then they may take an animal card from those available and add cubes to the empty spaces on it.

If the tokens placed on the player board match the pattern on an animal card the player has, they move the bottom cube from the animal card onto the space shown on the card on the player board.

land tokens can not be placed onto cubes on your board.

How do you win?

When someone has 2 empty spaces on their player board, players play even turns and then score.

You get points for the last cube removed from each animal card you took.

Green trees are scored and they gain more points if placed on the top of brown tokens up to a stack of 3 high. Grey mountains are 1, 2, and 3 high and score if next to another mountain.

Yellow fields score if in groups of 2 adjacent spaces and Townes score if at least two high and next to at least 3 other colour tokens.

The river scores points per space for the longest river you have.

Most points wins.

Main Mechanisms

Pattern Building is the main one. You need it to score both on the player board and animal cards.

USP

Nothing new here really. Everything has been done before in one way or another.

Theme

The theme is fairly abstract. The way the world is built up is fairly thematic scoring-wise. The animal cards not so much.

Setup

Put tokens in a bag and shuffle the cards, lay them out. I think that’s it.

Components & Artwork

The wooden tokens are nice and the graphic design is very clear on the animal cards.

The crib sheet could be clearer, especially with how to score towns.

The art on the animal cards is really nice with some very cute animals that stand out. The Otters are my favourite.

Ease of Teaching

Very easy. There isn’t much to go through and everything is open information so it’s quite straightforward.

Similar Games

There are loads of pattern-building games. Azul is fairly route one and Cascadia has the animal theme so they’re both relevant.

It reminds me most of Tiny Towns. Here you are building the pattern on the board with a view to turning those patterns into buildings. Not the same as the land/animal theme in harmonies but the thought patterns are similar.

Harmonies Review

Positives

The game looks really nice on the table.

The token selection board can be spun to select the first player and then also acts a first-player marker which is really cool.

The other side of the player board has a different layout and slightly different scoring rules.

It’s an interesting puzzle, fitting tokens on to score them while also matching animal cards to score them is a fun thing to achieve when it works. Especially when you can add a new animal card and start to score it the turn you take it.

When you add an animal cube to a space, you can no longer build on that space so you need to plan ahead, but…

Negatives

…taking all this into account on a turn that changes just before yours starts means turns are very slow.

It is a bit of a multiplayer solitaire game.

Summary

Harmonies is a very fun puzzle that you’ll come back to time and time again… just watch out for the many expansions I assume will be coming soon!

Jesta ThaRogue