Base price: $35.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: 30 – 45 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 9
Full disclosure: A review copy of Harmonies was provided by Asmodee USA.
It’s nice to actually write a review on not a Sunday, this week. Last week was too stressful! Trying to avoid the churn this time around. Not for any particular reason; I’m just busy tomorrow. Back to the Future: The Musical is in town, and that’s a movie that I love for being uniquely 80s and time-travely at the same time. Good stuff. There’s been a real rash of 80s and 90s movies being turned into musicals, I think due to something about how the rights are held, but I don’t want to get into that because then you’ll be here all day. Instead of focusing on vocal harmonies, why don’t we talk about Harmonies, the new board game from Libellud?
In Harmonies, players are trying to build animal habitats, a generally good thing. To do so, each turn you’ll take a few tokens from the token market and place them according to various rules. Only certain tokens can be placed on other tokens, for instance, and they can only be stacked so high. As you do, you can also acquire animal cards that seek specific habitats to settle in. Building habitats that match your animal cards (or rotations of them) let you place cubes, and completing an animal card frees up space for more. Just be careful! You can only hold four incomplete cards at a time. Use your habitats to score points and the player with the most points wins! Do you have what you need to build the best homes for your new animal friends?
Contents
Player Count Differences
This one’s a double draft game: you’re drafting two different things over the course of the game, so naturally, things will feel a bit different at higher or lower player counts. One thing you’ll run into a bit with fewer players is market stagnation. Essentially, there will be cards and tokens that nobody wants to take, and they’ll just sit for the entire game since there may not be sufficient diversity in playstyle for any of those cards to work for another player. At higher player counts, that issue is reduced pretty considerably. If you have a player who’s going all-in on rivers or stone, you’re unlikely to get those tokens unless they happen to pop out of the bag right before your turn. That can be frustrating, but with more players there’s likely to be more of that so you need to stay a bit more flexible. This does mean that both the token market and the card market will churn more regularly, but it also gives you more players to compete with for the things you specifically want. Whether or not that’s an improvement for you largely comes down to that usual refrain of “do you prefer tactical play or strategic play?”. In the former case, you’re going to need to think on your feet and change things up, so try Harmonies with more players. In the latter case, you’re better served with a two-player game, as two players will likely not be going after too many of the same tokens, so you can progress your strategies independently. I think it’s a great game at either end of the spectrum.
Strategy
- Water and Mountains are usually the easiest to place, so they’re usually in high demand. They just kind of need to be next to each other and you can get going pretty well on those, so that’s always nice. It just means that it can be hard to get them if other players need them, even more so if they’ve got animal cards that need them. If they sit in front of you in turn order, don’t even think about them.
- Don’t be afraid to build up. It’s good on two levels! One, it makes your stacks more valuable, and two, it lets you take some tokens that might not be as popular and turn them into something useful. Certain animal cards require higher stacks, anyways.
- Take cards, but make sure you have plans to complete them. If you’re just taking to take then you’ll end up stuck and unable to pick new cards that might fit you better. I usually fill three and only take a fourth if I’m about to complete a different one.
- Towards the end of the game, however, you can just take cards that will score some points. Something, score-wise, is usually better than nothing.
- Watch how much space you’re leaving yourself for tokens like Fields. If you’re not careful, the only place you can place a Field might connect two of yours, which will lose you a bunch of points! Don’t forget that and keep in mind where you can place certain tokens so that you can stay flexible.
- Sometimes you’ll get more points from completing a card than you will from scoring tokens, and sometimes not. Be flexible. I sometimes will build a two-stack of buildings or a big field specifically because I have a particular animal card that wants that configuration and that’s more valuable to me than five points off the scale.
- If you’re playing with a starting card, that should be your primary goal to finish. It has the biggest impact on your scoring (since it gives you a unique condition), so going with that is almost necessary. They never offer bad options; they’re strictly just ways to increase points, so that’s super fun.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- There’s such a fun variety of animals! There’s easily almost everyone’s favorite animal in this bunch, and I love that. I’m a big penguins guy, so naturally, I’m set with the penguins they have in the game, but I love when a game has a lot of variety.
- As is usually the case with Libellud games, the art is impeccable. Every card looks amazing, and the box is no slouch, either. It’s an extremely good-looking product, end-to-end. I’ve been consistently impressed and it almost always earns a comment when we play in person.
- I really like the color work too! This is a game that really pops on the table. There’s the few major colors that correspond to the token types, yes, but there’s also a lot of intense and wonderful color work happening on the actual cards themselves. They’re all great to look at.
- The tokens have a nice weight to them; it’s a game with good tactile appeal, too. I like how thick the various tokens are! They’re fun to stack, even if you’re not immediately using them. Just try not to lose any while you’re playing with them.
- I like that there are a few different ways to play straight out of the box with no expansion, though they’re not too far from the base game. You can play the alternate side of the board with a different water scoring condition, or you can add in Nature Spirits that add to your normal scoring. Both are pretty good ways to change it up, but even with them the game isn’t overwhelmingly different.
- Plays at a pretty good pace! You’re spending more time thinking about how to place what you have, in most cases. If you want, you can refill and let the other player figure out how to place their tokens, but if they’re taking that long you might wait to give them some space, I suppose. We tend to play a pretty friendly game, so we usually just let them work on their stuff while the other person plans for their turn.
- Fairly approachable, which is always nice. For a game with two separate drafting systems, it all ended up working out. I think new players will be taken in by the art and how quickly you can get the game up and running, and experienced players will like the bunch of configurations of options and straightforward strategy. It’s solid!
Mehs
- It’s a little funny when random chance leaves you with, say, three brown tokens or three yellow tokens as an option; they’re not terrible, but they usually sit for a while.
- There are a few easy mistakes for players to make that will frustrate them, somewhat. Lots of players make this first mistake, so make sure to emphasize that placement can be a bit tough. Namely, you can’t place cubes on the same token twice, which may affect the cards you want (as they might both feature the same major color). The rulebook recommends telling players to pick one of each major color card, for starters, which helps. Additionally, the placement and order of how you build and collect can throw you a bit if you’re not careful. Notably you can use a spot and then add onto it later, which might qualify you for different cards.
Cons
- I wish there was a way to refresh the market with fewer players, both for cards and for tokens. The market gets stale a bit without many players all taking something unique every turn. With higher player counts comes more differentiation by requirement, but with only two players, nobody’s taking the cards that don’t fit and they just stay there … forever. It’s not ideal since you have to spend your turn sifting through those.
Overall: 7.5 / 10
Overall, I think Harmonies is great! It’s got a lot of the core elements of a game that’s 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, and I love that. It’s not that the outcome is random, it’s just that players can very rapidly figure out how to go from the basics of the game to more complex strategy, and it makes me proud to see that happen. Beyond that, though, Harmonies is just a well-designed game and product. The insert works really well for keeping things organized, for instance, on the product end; on the game end, 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. I’d love to see alternate scoring conditions on some boards to shake up play a bit or incentivize different configurations of tokens to help churn the market a bit. My one complaint about the game is that the market can stall out if there are enough “bad” tokens, which can make the game feel a bit random. You’d essentially just be waiting to see whether or not the one space players take from happens to be any good on your turn, which isn’t advisable. Still, I really like how the cards incentivize playing differently every time, and I enjoy coming up with new strategies and playstyles depending on what I get. I’d love to see Harmonies get some level of expansion or additional content, but in the meantime, I’ve been having a great time with it on and offline. If you’re looking for a great game for a wide variety of players, you enjoy games with fantastic art, or you’ve just always imagined it would be fun to build habitats for animals, you’ll probably enjoy Harmonies too!
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