Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I came into Harmonies with low expectations. I can’t find it in me to get excited about a Libellud game. I’m sorry to the good people who work there, responsible for board game colossi Dixit and Mysterium. It’s not you, it’s me. Nevertheless, the idea of a cutesy game about nature from Asmodee’s family label did not thrill me.
Reading the rules, it rose in my estimation to solid but unremarkable. Cascadia meets Azul. You draft terrain tiles from a central board, place them on your player board to create specific animal habitats, and score points at the end of the game for your various geo- and zoological features. From what I read, there wasn’t anything wrong with it, but familiar mechanisms and an oversaturated theme are precariously balanced on the thin line between the comfortable and the redundant.
Then I saw the illustrations on the cards, which are exceptional. Maëva da Silva’s animals pulsate with life. These are not the adequate-but-unmoving cats from Calico, nor do they offer the staid photorealism of Wingspan. These critters have personality in spades. I wanted to swim with the otters, frolic with the bees. I wanted to build the Ram a home and furnish it with love.
Fortunately, that’s exactly what you do in Harmonies. The different terrains—dirt, water, flowers, grass, stone, and brick—can be combined in a multitude of ways to create the living conditions desired by the animals you add to your personal pool. The ram requires a mountain range. The crocodile craves a bayou. Set your tiles out correctly, and your board teems with life.
The geography itself is worth points too, separate from its faunal capacities. A tall tree, a long river, scattered flowerbeds, they all score you points. The math of Harmonies, the crunchy celery undergirding the salty peanut butter of the adorable presentation, reveals itself in the tradeoffs of these two scoring vectors. Is it better to embiggen my mountain range, or should I add an ocean to create a home fit for penguins? By the middle of the game, Harmonies had far exceeded my expectations. This was, unexpectedly, one of the best releases of 2024, an ideal light-medium weight game.
You come to feel ownership over your landscape. Despite the abstraction of the oblong tiles and translucent cubes, it feels like a world in miniature. The mountains in the northwest give way to a small river, surrounded on both sides by forest. While the play experience itself is uniform from game to game, the satisfaction and variety you draw from the different worlds you create provides the sense of variation many of us look for. Harmonies becomes as evocative as Unmatched or Root, which is certainly not something I expected.
Designer Johan Benvenuto and publisher Libellud have taken familiar, even exhausted ingredients and created something that doesn’t feel new, necessarily, but rather lands in the magical space of the familiar. We’ve all been playing Harmonies for years, right? It’s a cornerstone of most collections, surely. It feels impossible that it isn’t. By the end of that first game, Harmonies felt like the rarest of all beasts: it felt like a perennial.
Harmonies details
- Designer: Johan Benvenuto
- Artists: Maëva da Silva
- Publishers: ADC Blackfire Entertainment, Crowd Games, Galápagos Jogos, Gém Klub Kft., Hobby Japan, Korea Boardgames, Libellud, Rebel Sp. z o.o., Ігромаг
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 1 - 4
- Age range : 10+
- Time range : 30 - 45 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Open Drafting, Pattern Building, Tile Placement
- BGG Geek Rating: 8.03584 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
- More articles about Harmonies.
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