Harmonies

I first learned of Harmonies when it was covered by ThinkerThemer, first teased in games they were anticipating and then they did a full coverage on it. Based on their description, a drafting and placement game akin to the Calico and Cascadia series, this game seemed very much up my alley. Honestly, I think it blew up in popularity from word of mouth thanks to them.

I desired it so much, I ended up ordering it twice. Once as a preorder from Minature Market and played that copy, and then again from my local Mox Boarding House because they had limited promos that came with a purchase. I ended up gifting the in-shrink copy to a game library at a local convention.

To me it feels like it an elegant game because it balances between the distraught drafting choices of Calico, where you can easily get your plans thrown into disarray quickly, and the freedom of choice from Cascadia, which is a very chill and relaxed time. The fact that you draft your goals as you play is the perfect touch, putting the power in the player's hand for what strategy they want to try and play for each game. It's a great example of emergent player asymmetry.

It's very satisfying to plop the cubes from the animal cards to your arrangement, blocking off further development and possibly conflicting with other scoring cards. Plus the play time is very quick, sometimes a bit too quick and it can leave the feeling of wanting just a bit more turns or a bit more space. All to keep going, to keep building, comboing, and creating.

For such a small box the production is excellent. The pieces are colorful, easily distinguished by the screen printing, and feel great with the included cloth bag. The art is stunning with vibrant landscapes and each creature having a slight outline to feature showcase them on the art.

Scoring is simple, divided between the tokens you've placed and the animal cards you've fulfilled. I do think people can run into being surprised the first time with scoring tokens as it's very easy to simply focus on just the animal cards alone, similar to how in Cascadia the region majority can catch people off guard.

I had one friend play it and they remarked on how cut-throat the drafting could be, a lot like Azul. Which I think is completely fair, especially since that center drafting area of offered tokens can easily get stale at the lower player count. When playing solo, you actually have to choose 1 out of 3 piles and the other two automatically get discarded. I think a good house rule for 2 players is to choose one pile to discard to help things rotate, although that does lean into the cut-throatness by basically allowing hate draft.