First Impressions – Harmonies

Welcome to the first in a periodic series of posts where I give my first impressions on a game that I don’t think I’m going to end up playing enough to actually write a review for it.

I broached this subject in a previous Friday Night Shots post, and the idea seemed to go over well, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

Keep in mind that the reason I don’t think I’ll play it enough to review it is not necessarily because my first impression of it was a bad one.

It’s more that so many different games get brought to our game group, or sometimes a game is difficult to get to the table, that I’m predicting that I won’t get to play it enough to review.

The inaugural game in this series is Harmonies, published by Libellud Games in 2024.

The game was designed by Johan Benvenuto with artwork by Maëva da Silva.

It plays 1-4 players.

Harmonies is a beautiful game, combining a couple of different mechanisms that I love along with one that I’m not a fan of (mainly because my brain hurts when I try to do it).

With that intriguing thought, let’s take a look at it!

When I say the above, I’m not saying Harmonies is derivative at all.

Some of the best games, hell some of the best things in life, are the amalgamation of different things into an even better whole.

And I actually think that’s the case here.

Do you like Azul and it’s choice of one set of tiles to put on your board?

Do you like Cascadia and attempting to form a great habitat for the various animals, but hate how sprawling it might get on the table?

Harmonies is for you!

You have a player board. Your tiles will not go off of this board, so you’ve solved the sprawling problem!

Instead, you can go high, two or even three tiles deep.

Where’s the Azul?

On your turn, you have to draft one set of three tiles and then place those tiles in your habitat.

The perfect combination of tiles may not come up, so you have to plan for the future, which may not happen.

What are you doing with these tiles? Why are you placing them where you place them?

Could it be to score points?

(Editor: “Nah, couldn’t be”)

I can guess what you’re going to ask.

No, I didn’t think you were going to ask whether I wear boxers or briefs.

I thought you were going to ask “Dave, how do these tiles score?”

You really should get your priorities straight.

And stop asking personal questions.

Anyway, you score points based on animal cards that you’ve acquired and how they relate to the tiles you’ve placed on your board.

Each turn, after drafting tiles and placing them, you have the opportunity to choose an available animal card.

This card will give you a goal for how you are placing your tiles.

The Crow card (I assume that’s a crow, anyway) requires two red Building tiles with a Field tile in between them. The Building tiles must be 2-layered.

When you have that, you place a cube from the card on the indicated tile (in the Crow card, you’d place one on the Field tile, which seems appropriate except if you live in Vancouver, you know crows are all over the city too).

You can see in the player board picture how that works, as every combination of those tiles works, up to the number of cubes on the animal card and as long as the tile that would normally get a cube doesn’t already have one on it.

Tiles can even be part of multiple animal cards as long as at least one of them doesn’t require a cube to be placed on that tile.

So above, the red Building tiles can be part of both cards and even use all three cubes from the lizard!

The need for spatial awareness and planning is what gave me pause as I was playing it, mainly because the board is so restricted.

It worked out pretty well, though, other than misunderstanding the rule that grey Mountain tiles can only be stacked on other Mountain tiles. I misheard the person who explained the rules and actually did it wrong once, stacking a Mountain on a brown base tile.

In addition to the points you get for animal cards, you will also get points for the various terrain types, much like Cascadia.

Water tiles get you points if you chain them in a line (and they can’t have anything stacked on top of them). Fields get you 5 points if you have two or more adjacent in a group. So you don’t want to have any more than 2 in a group in order to maximize your points.

Buildings get you points if there are at least 3 different types of terrain around them.

And there are different points for tree height and mountain height if you have at least two of them together.

At the end of the game, your board might look like this!

That was worth 82 points, so not too shabby (though after discovering the misplayed Mountain, they let me rearrange my board a little bit).

Harmonies is such a pretty game, and it doesn’t have the Azul problem of having player pieces you want to eat.

Or maybe you don’t consider that a problem…

But anyway.

I love the tactile nature of the tiles, the ability, or rather requirement sometimes, to stack tiles on top of each other.

Cascadia is a lot 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, and in our one play it wasn’t too much of an issue.

My brain didn’t hurt too much.

I also really liked the scoring, where not only are you getting points for your tiles and their placement, but also for the animal cards that you take.

The ability to chain Animals (I meant the cards, I’m not a monster) into using the tiles for multiple cards is just awesome!

The above cards I mentioned, I was able to chain those all at once with one tile placement, clearing the cubes off of the lizard.

It was sublime.

The cards give you variety, rather than the Cascadia “these five animals score in this pattern, have at it.”

You get to choose how you score!

That’s amazing.

Overall, I really enjoyed my first play of Harmonies and no real faults jumped out at me. I haven’t read the rulebook yet, so I can’t comment on its quality, but the game and its components are really good.

I would definitely like to play this one again.

If I do happen to get enough plays in to review it, and my thoughts change at all, I will either update this post or do a new one (depending on how much they changed).

Have you played Harmonies?

What did you think of it? Would you say it’s a Cascadia killer, or can they co-exist?

Let me know in the comments.