Harmonies Review

boardgamequest.com:

I rarely take a moment to look at the back of the game box. Typically, I’m too eager to dig into contents, punch cardboard, and organize components. But Harmonies, designed by Johan Benvenuto and illustrated by Maeva Da Silva, was so cleanly packaged that I had time to take it all in. Plus, I wanted to learn how the game was represented in a block of descriptive text to potential buyers.

Harmonies does little to hide its simple charm as it describes itself in a single sentence: “Create a miniature world in which animals live in perfect harmony with nature!” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

For those familiar with Azul, the turn-by-turn process of Harmonies feels very similar. A central board is seeded with groupings of three tokens that represent different terrain. Players select a single grouping to add to their own personal board. These tokens must be placed immediately and there are different reasons to place tokens in certain arrangements. Play continues until tokens can no longer be drawn, or one player has two or fewer spaces left to fill.

So why are we placing these tokens? Harmonies provides direction via three avenues. First, players score points via common objectives for each terrain type. As an example, water tokens score based on how long of a river you can create. Trees and mountains score based on height and adjacency. Buildings score based on the surrounding diversity. There is an included player aid that provides each possible scoring option via these placements.

On a player’s turn, they have the option to take an animal card from a central market. This is the second avenue of direction and players have four slots available for these. Animal cards indicate the terrain arrangement that is necessary to take an animal cube from the card and add it to your tableau. Each card indicates how many animal cubes are added to it and each placed cube increases the card’s scoring potential.

The third avenue is an included module called Nature’s Spirit. Two