This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: Harmonies
Designer: Johan Benvenuto
Year: 2024
Country: France
Publisher: Libellud
Based on the title, I assumed Harmonies had something to do with music but in fact it’s a game about building different types of animals harmonious habitats. It’s a pretty abstract game, somewhat resembling Azul, except this time you try to fill the enclosure on your player board with terrain types that work together to house as many animal cubes as possible.
To know what kind of terrain formations you need, you pick animal cards with various shapes and combinations to go for. Once you have a card, you can try to create a matching landscape. Each turn, you must pick all three terrain tiles from one of the displays and play them all on your player board. This creates difficulties because maybe you only needed the two water tiles and have no use for the remaining rock tile.
Playing a game of Harmonies is easy but there’s a lot of complexity to the scoring system and how you can maximize your point scores by arranging the tiles as cleverly as possible. The animal cards give more points if you manage to create the same terrain shape twice or even three times, and as the tiles accumulate, getting them to mesh is more and more difficult.
In addition to this, you can also score bonus points by creating certain specific shapes and formations, so even if it doesn’t help you house your animals, there can still be a purpose to arranging leftover tiles.
On the first try, Harmonies felt like one of those games that pack an infinite amount of complexity into a small, simple mechanism, allowing for a lot of replay value.