Harmonies – Review

In The Jungle…

Designed by Johan Benvenuto, Harmonies sees you build three dimensional habitats, scoring for each animal you manage to house. After the success of 2021’s Cascadia, habitat building was to inspire a slew of games but Harmonies comes as a fresh, colourful addition to the hobby. Everything about the game is designed to make you feel warm and fuzzy, from its gorgeous brightly coloured artwork of cutesy animals to the satisfying chatter of wooden terrain tiles being drawn from a cotton bag. That’s not to say this game is all style and no substance, there is more definitely a great game here too.

The Mighty Jungle…

In Azul form, three terrain tokens are drawn from the bag and placed on a series of tiles in the middle of the table. There are a number of colours/types, such as grey mountains, red buildings, yellow fields, blue rivers, brown tree trunks and green foliage. Each animal will dictate exactly what type of terrain it wants to live in, illustrated on their card. Each card will have a number of animal cubes and for every habitat you create you can place a cube, scoring for the highest number revealed by the end of the game. For example, the Racoons will only live on your board if you surround a yellow field token with three blue river tokens. Do this and you get to place one of the two raccoon cubes onto the field token. Only one animal cube can be placed on a terrain token, however any other elements of the habitat can be utilised for a multitude of terrains. On your turn you will need to take a card, of which you can only have four at one time, then take one group of three tokens, placing them all onto your personal player mat before placing as many animal cubes as you possibly can. Once an animal card is empty of cubes you can turn it over to score at the end of the game, freeing up a slot for a new card on your next turn. The game will continue until either the bag of tokens is emptied or until any player has only three empty spaces left on their board.

Finally, scores are tallied and highest wins. But on top of the animal cards you can also score for the types of terrains you have on your mat. Fields give you points if you connect them in pairs or more around your board. Forrest tokens give one point by default. But if you can place them atop a wood token, then they’re worth three or two wood tokens and then seven. The height of each Mountain determines the number of points you score. However, a Mountain is worth 0 points if it is not adjacent to another Mountain. Buildings need to be surrounded by at least three other types of tokens and the length of the River determines the number of points you earn, counting the number of tokens from one end of the river to the other by the shortest path and you only score your best river. If the river's path contains more than 6 consecutive tokens, score 4 points for each token beyond the 6th.