A vibrant, light-medium-weight spatial puzzle!
"(Review after 3 plays. Purchased at ~40% off RRP [70AUD]. ) In Harmonies, players take turns placing thick wooden tiles on their limited board to create landscapes for animals with different habitat requirements. You score for the patterns your make in the terrain, and for the animal cubes you successfully place. Each animal has its own pattern to match, and each player will pick their own selection of animals to bring into their landscape. The production quality is very nice, coming with a pretty box insert, a big bag for all your colourful, chunky wooden terrain tokens, and a deck of animal cards with really vibrant and fun artwork. The little transparent golden cubes that represent the animals you place are nice too -- I do find them a little abstract for my taste, but it makes sense for playability why they were made that way. The player boards are clear and durable, and the chunky wooden tokens are fun to rummage through, place, and stack. The game doesn't take up a lot of table space and is extremely easy to set up and pack away, which makes it easy to bring out. It has a colourful board presence as well! The gameplay is rather puzzly but tactical - the options available to you will change a little every turn, moreso with more players, so while good long-term planning is still rewarded by granting more scoring opportunities, there are times where you just won't have the card or tiles you want, and will have to improvise a little. It's a thinking game, but not one that'll burn you out from the excess of options in heavier titles. My group has a history of analysis paralysis with games like this, but even so we finish games of Harmonies smoothly and *relatively* quickly. If you've played Cascadia, some of the mechanics may sound familiar, but Harmonies expands on the idea by adding verticality to the tile-laying puzzle, and more complex pattern-scoring rules, which I personally find more interesting to puzzle through. Instead of a few global animal patterns, in Harmonies you have the option of picking up animal cards to place next to your own board, meaning each player will score animals differently. I do somewhat miss the animal tokens actually having animals on them, but Harmonies makes up for it by having a much wider variety of animals and scoring conditions - a whole deck! Despite being a lot more thinky than Cascadia, in my experience Harmonies runs for a similar play duration, and I find the spatial puzzle more satisfying. That being said, I do think Cascadia offers a different enough, and less think-y experience, that I'm not upset at having both. I reckon both Cascadia and Harmonies are great entry-level or family games, with the former being more appropriate for perhaps the less puzzly-inclined, but the latter being my personal preference, for a more thinky game that still feels light. For some people, Harmonies can be more difficult to wrap your head around at first, but give it a few goes and I think you'll get the hang of it. One of my minor gripes with Harmonies is that it's hard to tell when the game's about to end, as the game ends at the round where any player reaches two or fewer empty spaces on their board, or when the bag runs out of tokens - which can be difficult to predict at higher player counts depending on where in turn order you sit, and thus you can be left with setups that never get paid off. This is mostly a skill issue though haha, as with more plays, you get a better intuition of the pace of the game, which is usually quite consistent. There's also a bit of randomness, regarding which animal cards are available and which group-of-three tiles you'll be able to pick from on your turn, but to me it still feels like you have more control than in something like Cascadia. I'm aware that some people also won't like that this is a bit of a solitaire game - as while you can theoretically do a bit of adversarial drafting, or speeding towards endgame conditions to foil other players' plans, it's generally a very low player interaction game. My family and I personally still tend to like (even prefer) this type of game though, and if you're a more casual boardgamer, or a fan of anything like Cascadia or Wingspan, you probably will too! The game also comes with a small mini-expansion in the form of the Nature Spirit cards, which each player gets one of, giving them the opportunity to gain more unique terrain scoring options by placing their spirit cube the same way you place animal cubes. I haven't played with the Nature Spirit cards yet as they add quite a bit more asymmetry to an already somewhat asymmetrical game, and so the rulebook advises against them for the first few plays, but it looks like an interesting addition if you want to add some more novelty to the game. Overall, Harmonies sits between my quick lighter-weight games and by longer heavier-weight games, as a solid light-midweight box. It's a more involved game, that I can still introduce easily to people who've never played board games, which is great to have! That being said, it's not a super fast game (depends on how fast your players make decisions I suppose!), so it's not something I'd take out as a quick party game per se. Nor is it an especially long, elaborate, or sprawling heavier title, and it leans towards abstraction more than theme or narrative (though the theming is still more interesting to me than something like azul or cascadia!) - so it's not something I'd be the most excited to bring out very often for my more experienced heavy-boardgamer friends either. I find it most suited for us when the family wants to play something not-too-difficult but when I still want an engaging challenge. I've only had it for a while, so longevity is yet to be determined, but I don't expect it to leave my collection anytime soon. It sits at a strong 8/10 on BGG, and I think that rating is about apt! As for goodgames' service - it was pretty good by my books! I purchased my copy online, and though they were initially very slow at responding to some enqueries I had about the game and delivery, due to a busy period, when they did get back to me, they were very helpful and my package arrived safely and promptly. Worth noting that emailing the specific shop branch got me a much prompter response than the online store email - though both were very quick and easy to communicate with once making first contact. The game arrived sealed only with two small stickers to keep the lid on, and was delivered in a bigger box with paper padding. On one hand, I instinctively somewhat prefer the protection of a plastic shrinkwrap, which this game box lacks, but on the other hand, there wasn't any notable damage anyhow, and less soft plastics used is probably the better choice environmentally, which I do appreciate for a game about natural environments and animal habitats!"
