OBJECTIVE OF HARMONIES: Build the highest-scoring landscape by placing terrain tokens and settling animals into the habitats you create.
NUMBER OF PLAYERS: 1 to 4 players (solo mode included)
MATERIALS: 1 Central board, 4 Personal boards, 120 terrain tokens, 66 Animal cubes, 32 Animal cards, a cloth pouch
TYPE OF GAME: Tile-placement / pattern-building board game
AUDIENCE: 8+
OVERVIEW OF HARMONIES
Johan Benvenuto designed this one for Libellud, and it landed in the middle of 2024 to an unusual amount of buzz for a game with no combat, no dice, and nothing more dramatic than colored tokens and tiny wooden animals. It’s since become a regular fixture on “best games of the year” lists, and it’s easy to see why once you actually sit down with it.
Each player builds their own miniature ecosystem, one small handful of tokens at a time. Stack the right terrain in the right pattern and an animal moves in. Ignore the terrain entirely and just chase raw points instead, and you can win that way too. Balancing those two competing goals, cute animal habitats against cold hard scoring, is where the whole game lives.
SETUP
Place the Central board with its 2-4 Players side facing up. Drop every terrain token into the cloth pouch, give it a shake, then fill each of the five spaces on the Central board with three tokens drawn randomly from the pouch.
Shuffle the Animal cards and reveal five of them face up near the Central board, with the rest forming a draw pile. Each player takes a Personal board, choosing either Side A, which scores water as a winding river, or Side B, which scores it as separated islands. New groups usually start with Side A.
HOW TO PLAY HARMONIES
Play moves clockwise, and every turn breaks down into one required move and two optional ones.
TAKING AND PLACING TOKENS
Pick one of the five spaces on the Central board and take all three tokens sitting on it. Place them anywhere on your Personal board, together or spread out, it’s entirely up to you. Tokens can stack on top of one or two tokens already on your board to form Trees, Mountains, or Buildings, but you can never slide a token underneath something already placed, and nothing can go under or on top of an Animal cube.
TAKING AN ANIMAL CARD
Once per turn, you may take one of the five face-up Animal cards. Doing so hands you a set of cubes matching the number of spots shown on that card. You can hold up to four Animal cards at a time, so it’s worth thinking about which habitats you can realistically complete before grabbing a fifth you’ll never use.
SETTLING ANIMALS
Whenever a section of your Personal board matches the exact Habitat pattern shown on one of your Animal cards, and it’s correctly oriented, you can place one of that card’s cubes there. This is unlimited, so a single turn can settle several animals at once if your board lines up right. Once every cube on a card has been placed, set that card aside and pick up a new one whenever you like.
At the end of your turn, refill the Central board space you emptied with three fresh tokens from the pouch, and top the row of Animal cards back up to five if it’s fallen short.
SCORING YOUR LANDSCAPE
Every terrain type scores differently, and most of your final total comes from getting these combinations right.
- Trees form when a green token sits on top of zero, one, or two brown tokens, giving you a tree of height 1, 2, or 3. Those heights are worth 1, 3, and 7 points.
- Mountains work almost the same way, stacking gray tokens up to three high for 1, 3, or 7 points, but a mountain scores nothing at all unless it sits next to at least one other mountain.
- Fields need just two connected yellow tokens to count, and every separate field is worth a flat 5 points, no matter how large it grows beyond that.
- Buildings form when a red token sits on top of a brown, gray, or red token, and they score 5 points only if surrounded by at least three different colors, counting just the top token of each neighboring stack.
- Water depends entirely on which side of the board you chose. Side A rewards you for the longest unbroken chain of blue tokens, scoring points per tile in that chain. Side B instead pays 5 points for every separate section of land your rivers manage to cut off from the rest.
END OF GAME AND WINNING
The game ends one of two ways: the pouch can’t supply enough tokens to refill the Central board, or a player finishes their turn with two or fewer empty spaces left on their board. Either trigger just finishes out the current round first, so everyone gets the same number of turns.
Add up your Landscape score with the value of every completed Animal card, and whoever has the highest total wins. Ties go to whoever placed the most Animal cubes overall, and if that’s still tied, the win is shared.
FAQ
Not really. The turn structure is just take tokens, place them, and optionally work on animals. Most of the real complexity comes from the scoring rules, which take a game or two to fully internalize.
Yes. The box includes a dedicated solo mode using a smaller version of the Central board and only three Animal cards, where you’re trying to beat your own past scores rather than an opponent.
Side A scores water as a connected river, rewarding one long chain. Side B scores it as separated islands instead, rewarding you for using water to divide your board into distinct sections.
No. Once a cube is placed, it stays there permanently, even if you later stack more tokens on top in a way that would technically break the original pattern.
They get compared a lot since both involve terrain and animal placement, but the actual gameplay is quite different. Cascadia is a tile-and-token drafting game with a shared board of hexes, while Harmonies is built entirely around your own Personal board and a central pool of loose tokens.
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