In 2024, one board game soared to the top of enthusiast wishlists and became the talk of gaming communities worldwide. Harmonies, designed by Johan Benvenuto and published by Libellud, captivated players with its stunning visual appeal and elegant gameplay. The colorful circular tiles and beautifully illustrated art cards immediately catch your eye, but does this nature-building puzzle game deliver substance behind its gorgeous presentation? After extensive playthroughs, the answer is a resounding yes.
What Is Harmonies?
In Harmonies, build landscapes by placing colored tokens and create habitats for your animals. To earn the most points and win the game, incorporate the habitats in your landscapes wisely and have as many animals as you can settle there. This abstract strategy game for 1-4 players combines tile drafting, pattern matching, and set collection into a remarkably cohesive and satisfying experience that plays in 30-45 minutes.
The game draws comparisons to beloved titles like Cascadia and Azul, but Harmonies establishes its own identity through unique mechanics and presentation that make it feel both familiar and fresh.
Components: A Feast for the Eyes
The chunky wooden Landscape Tokens come in six different colors, with five of them printed with different symbols that tie in perfectly with the card artwork. The tokens are a wonderful size, maybe a little wider than a quarter but much thicker, and feel great in your hands. The production quality throughout the box is exceptional:
Landscape Tokens – Six different terrain types (grass, water, flowers, stone, dirt, and wood) represented by thick, tactile wooden discs that are deeply satisfying to handle and stack.
Animal Cards – Gorgeously illustrated cards featuring various wildlife from rams to crocodiles, each requiring specific habitat patterns to score points.
Player Boards – Double-sided boards offering two difficulty levels with clear spaces for token placement and stacking.
Player Aids – Player Aids covered with clarifying art that every player uses throughout their first few games, unlike typical reference cards that get ignored.
Central Drafting Board – A compact board with five spaces for token selection.
Animal Cubes – Small orange translucent cubes used to track animal placement requirements.
The insert deserves special mention for keeping everything organized and making setup a breeze. The player board is wonderful to see as it builds up over the course of the game, creating landscapes that feel genuinely personal and evocative.
How to Play: Simple Rules, Deep Strategy
Setup
Place the starting board on the table and seed each of the five spaces with three random tokens from the bag. Five Animal cards are placed face-up in a row with the remainders forming a deck nearby. Each player takes a player board, and one of the two sides is agreed upon for this game. Optionally, players can include Spirit Animal cards for advanced play that modify scoring conditions.
Turn Structure
On a player turn, the active player must take and place tokens once, and they may optionally take an Animal card and optionally place an Animal Cube. Let’s break down each action:
1. Draft and Place Tokens (Mandatory)
Players need to choose collectively which side of the player board to use: the larger or smaller side. On your turn, you will draft three discs from one of the depots on the central drafting board. These will be placed on your personal board with the intention of meeting the scoring objectives for that type of terrain.
Placement rules add strategic constraints:
- Tokens can only be placed on your player board according to specific stacking rules
- Certain terrain types can stack on others (creating elevation)
- Maximum height restrictions apply
- Patterns matter for both terrain scoring and animal habitat creation
2. Take an Animal Card (Optional)
Choose one card from the five-card market and place orange cubes on it according to the card’s requirements. Each animal has specific habitat needs shown through illustrated patterns on the card.
3. Place an Animal Cube (Optional)
You can choose to complete objectives on animal cards by removing an amber cube from the card and placing it on the matching terrain disc as shown in the illustration on the card. This transforms abstract tokens into living habitats populated by wildlife.
Scoring
Points come from two primary sources:
Terrain Scoring – Each landscape type scores differently. A tall tree, a long river, scattered flowerbeds—they all score you points. The geography itself is worth points separate from its faunal capacities.
Animal Scoring – Successfully creating habitats and placing animal cubes according to pattern requirements generates additional points. The scoring combines points for your tiles and their placement, plus points for the animal cards you take.
The game ends when the token bag is empty and all tokens have been drafted. The player with the most points wins.
The Harmonies Experience: More Than the Sum of Its Parts
The Strategic Puzzle
Each turn, you have to choose a set of tokens from the supply, but there are a number of things to consider when choosing. Each particular token type has its own way of scoring, and you might be choosing tokens simply for that. As you collect Animal cards, you will also be able to move tokens from the card to your board based on matching the patterns of that specific card.
The math of Harmonies, the crunchy celery undergirding the salty peanut butter of the adorable presentation, reveals itself in the tradeoffs of these two scoring vectors. Is it better to embiggen my mountain range, or should I add an ocean to create a home fit for penguins?
This creates fascinating tactical decisions every turn. Do you draft tokens that extend your scoring terrain features, or grab the specific combination needed for your animal cards? The tension between these competing objectives drives engagement throughout the game.
Emotional Connection to Your Landscape
You come to feel ownership over your landscape. Despite the abstraction of the oblong tiles and translucent cubes, it feels like a world in miniature. The mountains in the northwest give way to a small river, surrounded on both sides by forest.
This emotional resonance elevates Harmonies beyond typical abstract games. While the play experience itself is uniform from game to game, the satisfaction and variety you draw from the different worlds you create provides the sense of variation many of us look for. Harmonies becomes as evocative as Unmatched or Root, which is certainly not something expected.
Accessibility Meets Depth
The rulebook does its job exceedingly well, with gorgeous clarifying art and written in a manner that is easy to understand from front to back. Players, whether they be new to modern board gaming or old pros, will have no hard time understanding the turn actions and flow of the game.
It’s got a lot of the core elements of a game set up for broad appeal: it looks great, has nice tactile components, and is approachable without sacrificing strategy. It’s the kind of game that players can hit the ground running with and still beat you at if you’re not careful.
Comparisons to Similar Games
Cascadia – Both games involve building nature-themed landscapes and scoring for terrain and wildlife, but Cascadia is more free-form as you can’t really make an illegal tile placement, just one that will kill your chances to score. The constricting nature of the player board in Harmonies is something to get used to.
Azul – Both share choice of one set of tiles to put on your board, but Harmonies adds vertical stacking and pattern matching complexity. Harmonies doesn’t have the Azul problem of having player pieces you want to eat.
Overall Feel – Designer Johan Benvenuto and publisher Libellud have taken familiar, even exhausted ingredients and created something that doesn’t feel new necessarily, but rather lands in the magical space of the familiar.
Solo Mode
There is a solo game where you try to get the most Solo points—determined by the number of points you score, the side of the board you use, and whether or not you use Nature’s Spirit cards. This mode uses the Solo side of the board which only has three spaces for tokens.
While the solo mode works, it’s not necessarily the selling point of this game. The multiplayer experience remains the highlight.
Player Count and Replayability
Harmonies shines at all player counts from 1-4. Games with players familiar with the rules are closer to 30 minutes, making it an excellent filler or opener for game nights.
There are a nice number of variants or alternate boards to allow players to experiment with the game as they develop new interests. Plus, there are even alternate boards that players are adding online that can change things up.
Pros and Cons
Strengths:
- Stunning visual presentation and table presence
- High-quality, tactile components that enhance gameplay
- The puzzle and scoring strategies are delightful to explore
- Easy to teach but offers genuine strategic depth
- Emotional connection to the landscapes you create
- Excellent player aids that actually get used
- Quick setup and cleanup with functional insert
- Plays smoothly at all player counts 1-4
- Creates beautiful end-game tableaus worth photographing
- Quick setup time and easy to comprehend rules mean it can be taught to new board gamers or even young players
Potential Drawbacks:
- Animal cards could have slightly more distinct illustrations to show patterns; players sometimes don’t correctly see that some tokens are stacked in a pattern, which can mess up their whole game
- The market can stall out if there are enough “bad” tokens, which can make the game feel a bit random
- There is honestly nothing particularly innovative in Harmonies – familiarity might disappoint players seeking revolutionary mechanics
- Only four scenarios in base game without expansions
- Limited direct player interaction (mostly multiplayer solitaire)
- Pattern recognition requirements may challenge some players
Who Should Buy Harmonies?
Perfect For:
- Fans of Cascadia, Azul, or Calico looking for similar experiences
- Players who appreciate beautiful components and presentation
- Families seeking games accessible to ages 10+
- Gateway game enthusiasts who introduce new players to hobby gaming
- Anyone who enjoys building and creating during gameplay
- Solo gamers wanting a relaxing puzzle experience
- Groups seeking 30-45 minute games with minimal downtime
Consider Alternatives If:
- You strongly dislike abstract strategy games
- Direct player confrontation is essential to your enjoyment
- You need heavy thematic integration between mechanics and setting
- Pattern recognition puzzles frustrate rather than engage you
- You require deep strategic complexity on par with heavy euros
Price and Value
At approximately $35-45 retail, Harmonies delivers exceptional value. The component quality alone justifies the price point, and the replayability through variable animal cards and dual-sided boards ensures the game won’t feel stale after a few plays.
Overall, it is a lovely parcel and there is plenty of board game to appreciate inside the box.
The Verdict
Harmonies is like a cup of hot chocolate in that it delivers a nice warm feeling around the table. What’s most appealing is that it will still get you head scratching at times looking for the optimal options.
This is one of those games that just works so well. It’s on the upper end of games to play with casual gamers, but it’s one of the rare games that could work well with both newcomers and experienced hobbyists.
The combination of gorgeous presentation, tactile satisfaction, elegant rules, and meaningful strategic choices creates an experience that feels effortless and inviting. While it may not revolutionize mechanisms, Harmonies perfects the execution of familiar concepts into something genuinely special.
I think I will always enjoy playing Harmonies. The puzzle and scoring strategies are delightful to explore and the table presence sets it all off very nicely indeed. Be sure to give it a try if you get the opportunity.
Final Score: 8.75/10 – A beautiful, accessible puzzle game that deserves its place in most collections.
Where to Buy
Amazon Link: Buy Harmonies on Amazon
Harmonies is available on Amazon, at local game stores, and directly from Asmodee (Libellud’s parent company). Given its popularity since release, availability may vary, but restocks happen regularly. The game makes an excellent gift for gamers and non-gamers alike.
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