Harmonies

The Game

Harmonies is one of the hot games on BoardGameArena.com now. It is about creating your own forest by placing different types of discs. Specific combinations of discs form habitats for different animals, and you score points by attracting animals to your forest. The game is played until one player almost fills their player board. 

On your turn you must claim a group of three discs from five groups available on the table. You must place the discs onto your player board, i.e. your forest. Discs come in 6 different colours, and there are rules for each colour. Blue is water, and yellow is fields. They can only ever be directly placed onto the board, and they cannot be stacked onto other discs. Other discs cannot be stacked onto them either. For other colours, things get a little more complicated. Green is greenery (of course) and brown is wood. Green when placed directly on the board is grass. When green is placed on one brown, that's a small tree. When placed on two browns, you get a tall tree. Grey is mountains. They can be stacked up to three. Red is houses. They can be stacked up to two, and they can be stacked on red, brown or grey. 

It is mandatory to take discs on your turn, but claiming an animal card is optional. An animal card specifies the disc combination you need to attract that animal type. There are two or more animal cubes on an animal card, and whenever you fulfil the condition, you get to move a cube from the animal card to your forest. This is when you score points. The more cubes you move from an animal card, the higher the points per cube. Ideally you want to use up all the cubes on your animal cards. 

The same discs or stacks of discs can be used to fulfil multiple conditions. If you look at this screenshot above, the first and second animal cards need green-green-blue and red-green-green respectively, but the first card requires the cube to be placed on the blue, while the second card requires the cube to be placed on the green. This means they don't conflict, and they greatly help each other. Symbiosis! You can see that for both animal cards the required combinations have been achieved twice, thus two cubes  have been placed for both of them. 

In addition to scoring using the animal cards, how you place discs also scores points. For example if your red is surrounded by at least three different colours, it scores five points. So this is something you want to consider too when you place your discs.

The Play

This is a game with a spatial element. You want to find animal cards which coexist well, so that you save on discs and also space. When you save space, it means you can claim more animals cards and try to fulfil them. You will have several goals being pursued at once, and you try to fulfil these different conditions all at the same time. This makes the game puzzle-like. You keep an eye out for animal cards which jive well with your existing forest. You want to watch what discs and even animals your opponents might want. In case you are wanting the same things, you'd have more urgency to take certain discs or animals cards. Every time a player takes a group of discs, it is immediately replaced with a random new group. So you always have five groups to choose from. 

The Thoughts

This is a peaceful game. You are mostly happily building your own forest. You try to find savings. You want to find symbiotic relationships, so that you save on discs and space. You want to do more with less. It's an abstract game, but I must say it does create that kind of symbiotic and harmonious feeling.