Intertwine animal habitats to make the most of your space, in this delightful little game
Although similar in theme to the last game I reviewed, Cascadia – Harmonies is a very different game. The board size is much more limited, and there’s more strategy involved in making the most of what’s available. It can also be played solo, but I have yet to give it a whirl.
Gameplay
Each player gets their own board; they are two-sided, with each side having a slightly different scoring mechanism for rivers. The boards are not large, so making the most of your space is important for a decent score. Five sets of three random habitat tiles are drawn and placed on a separate board shared by the players. These are your options when your turn comes around – pick any set of three.
Five animal cards are drawn from the deck and placed face-up; these are also shared by the players. You can pick any one on your turn, and hold up to a maximum of four active cards. Each card has 2-5 cube spots, and these represent the number of times you need to place that animal to clear the card. Cards with two cubes will generally be more demanding of terrain but score higher per cube.
The animal cards display a terrain layout and a position on that layout that can take that card’s animal cube. This is where strategy comes into play – one must interlink and overlap the patterns to make the most of their board.
On your turn you must take and place one of the sets of three terrain tokens, you may also place up to one animal cube and take one animal card (holding no more than four with cubes present). These actions can be taken in any order, but at least one habitat token needs to be placed first.
Certain terrain tokens can stack. Trees are made from one green token (or 1-2 brown pieces with a green on top), mountains can be anywhere from 1-3 pieces high, and buildings must always be two high to score. You can (and often should) change an animal’s habitat pattern once an animal’s cube has been placed upon it – allowing you to score more terrain points or another animal’s token to be placed.
You cannot make changes to a stack on which there is an animal cube. Those are fixed, they live there now; what are you, a monster?
Terrain is also scored in Harmonies. Tree points scale with their height – as do mountains, but they must always be next to at least one other mountain. Meadows must span two or more tokens, and buildings need to be surrounded by tokens of at least three different colours. Rivers are scored for their length if you are playing with board side A, or by how many islands have been created with side B.
The game ends when any player has fewer than three vacant spaces on their board.
Nature’s Spirit cards
Entirely optional are Harmonies’ Nature’s Spirit cards. Two are randomly given to players at the start of the game and they get to choose one. They count towards the four-card maximum and are used to add another dimension to terrain token scoring.
Spirit cards have a habitat pattern like any other animal card, but there is only one cube and it nets you no points. What placing the cube does grant you is the ability to score extra points on certain terrain tokens. For example, a Nature’s spirit card might give you an extra five points for each meadow of 1+ size, or additional points for mountains/trees. This gives you something else to think about and can encourage you to focus more on one type of habitat.
Thoughts
I did at first find the game’s length frustrating; it seemed to be over too quickly and I never got to enact my ‘grand plan’. I’ve since come to appreciate the shorter playtime; it forces you to make the most of what’s available. With many board games you are ultimately at the mercy of whatever random cards and tokens the gods bestow – and Harmonies is no exception. You can get very lucky, or you may end up internally screaming into the void. Roll with this and you’ll have a better experience.
Interlinking and overlapping habitats is a great mechanic, embellished further by allowing habitats to be modified when cubes have already been placed. Terrain scoring gives you something else to focus on when your habitat patterns just aren’t working out – which will happen at some point. Nature’s Spirit cards are good at spicing things up after your first few games.
The card artwork is very nice and the components all seem to be of good quality.
Much like Cascadia, Harmonies is not an adversarial game. Beyond comparing final points, you don’t really compete with players; you can go out of your way to take tokens others need, but that’s it.
I have only a couple of criticisms, and they are small. First, the board that holds the sets of terrain tokens is quite small. I have dinnerplate-sized hands and I’m forever knocking tokens everywhere when I replace them. Second, the rules explaining Harmonies’ Nature’s Spirit cards are not great and could do with some extra detail. It’s possible that I’m just a bit dense.
At around £32 it’s fairly decent value. Although we’ve played it countless times over the last couple of weeks, it’s still one of our favourites.