Harmonies
- David Fox
- 17 minutes ago
- 4 min read
To kick things off at my local game group’s last session before each Christmas, we have a 30-40 player game of Wits’n’Wagers (NorthStar Games): it’s chaotic, but fun. Back in 2019, one of the questions I set was 'What percentage of people in the UK listen to podcasts?'; the answer was a depressingly low 9%... apparently we’re descended from Philistines, who knew‽ Things have improved since then - the almighty Google now reckons we’re at 19% (global 23%, US 55%, for reference) - but I still feel this niche private radio service is undervalued by too many. Don't worry, read on, there is a point to this...
Recently, Board Game Top Tens with Remy Gibson reached 1000 episodes: OK, they rarely exceed 10 minutes, but that’s still quite an achievement and I’ll admit that, as well as being genuinely interested in the fluctuating fortunes of the latest and greatest board games (as ranked by BoardGameGeek), his dulcet tones are a draw. Some games appear in the Top Ten hotness once, maybe twice, then disappear into obscurity; others, like Brass: Birmingham (Roxley Games), Terraforming Mars (FryxGames) and Root (Leder Games) are ever-presents. While it has not made as much of an impact as, for instance, Arcs (Leder Games), Johan Benvenuto’s Harmonies has been a regular on the podcast since before its release by Libellud in early 2024 and I bought it as soon as I could.
Harmonies is a pattern building game in which, on a personal hex grid landscape that you build round by round, you are trying to create areas of specific Terrain types on which to place multiples of Animals. You draft both Terrain and Animals as the game progresses and each will score you points at game’s end; each Terrain type rewards specific placement (eg: clusters of high mountains and lengths of rivers) and more of the same type of Animal you place yields greater victory point (VP) returns.
For the most part, the presentation is excellent: a sensibly sized box opens to reveal a pleasing arrangement of beautifully illustrated and well-designed cards and thick wooden tokens, the latter being drawn from a high-quality bag throughout play. The tokens are bright and chunky discs with Terrain icons screen-printed on them too in case of colour-blindness. The player mats are clear and two-sided, with variant scoring rules on the flip side, and tho' those are nothing too ‘advanced’ they do change things up. The rulebook complements the aesthetics with clear guidance of how to play. The only things that do not live up to the rest of the production are the orange cubes which represent the animals you have placed and the central mat from which you draft Terrain tokens - both are quite bland.
The heart of Harmonies is the pattern-building puzzle of accommodating multiple Animals within interwoven Terrain: optimising that is key. In a multiplayer game there is tension in the draft of both elements but, other than that, the game is multiplayer solitaire and, unsurprisingly given its nature, there are solo play rules provided. Play continues either until the bag is out of tiles or one player has two or fewer spaces left on their board; the player with the highest VP is the winner.
When news of Harmonies first come out it was described as 'Azul meets Cascadia'. Well that was half wrong: just because there is a central tile draft area doesn’t make it Azul (Next Move/Plan B) — for me, the brilliance in Azul’s draft is when the untaken pieces move to the middle and form an organic draft area, creating tension and interaction; Harmonies’ draft area is three groups of three tokens, that’s it - no nuance. As for Cascadia (AEG/Flatout Games)? Nature themed and and pattern building, fair enough; but, whereas Cascadia is open and expansive - hey, look, thematic! - Harmonies is closed and restrictive. What people should have described the game as is 'Cascadia meets Tiny Towns'.
Peter McPherson’s Tiny Towns came out from AEG in 2019 and is a clever design that evokes John Conway’s Game of Life on a, well, tiny 4x4 board as cubes appear, form patterns, and disappear to create buildings. Replacing drafting is a rotating player’s decision about which cube will be placed this round (tho' there is a much less mean-spirited deck of cards to use instead). Tiny Towns starts small and gets smaller and smaller until, after growing frustration and exasperation, you are forced to concede failure and end participation. I almost hit double figures of plays of Tiny Towns, but that ever-constricting construction got less and less fun the more I played, especially when players started deliberately picking cubes that were useless to everyone else.
Harmonies doesn’t have much in the way of such spite beyond that minimal draft, but it does strongly remind me of Tiny Towns’ increasingly cramped game play in which your options grow ever more constrained, to that point of ultimate doom. Whereas a dexterity game like Villa Paletti (Zoch Verlag) builds to a point of excitement and everything comes crashing down, for me the sense of inevitability in games like Tiny Towns and Harmonies means I don’t approach them with a sense of possibility, more futility. Neither I, nor those I played it with, found it much fun; I sold my copy on at the price I bought it.
Now, Harmonies is currently ranked in the Top 100 on BoardGameGeek which means I am very much in the minority in holding this opinion; tho' someone I later talked to about it had also moved their copy of the game on quickly, citing the same aversion to board game induced claustrophobia. I’m happy to be ‘wrong’; not every game is for everyone: Brass: Birmingham is an objectively amazing design yet I have no desire to return to its dark decision space. While I don’t know that Harmonies will achieve ‘evergreen’ status, I would not be surprised if it does, and there’s a good chance you would enjoy more than I did. For sure, I expect it to be on Board Game Top Tens for quite some time, yet.
(Review by David Fox)
