Matthew BaileyToday, we are going to play the current hotness, and that is “Harmonies”, played with Jack (9 and Toby (6).
“Harmonies” is a cute and beautiful tile drafting and placing game that has caused quite a bit of press over the last few months. Essentially, each player starts with a landscape, of which there are two that give ever so slightly different rules and the central board is filled with groups of three tiles, similar to how “Azul” is laid out if you are aware of that game.
On your turn, you draft three tiles which can then be placed into your landscape, and equally then take a card, of which you can have four, that allows you to gain points by fulfilling certain conditions such as a mountain next to a river or a tree next to a building.
What is particularly interesting here is that the laying of these tiles is multi-layered, meaning there are quite a few options to work out specific placement.
This continues until you’ve worked through the tiles or one player only has two spaces left, and at that point, after everyone finishes their turn, you score.
Scoring works in two ways: you work out how many points you have gained from fulfilling the specific criteria on the card you have gained, and then also everyone gets stock points for how they have built their area, such as amounts of fields and lengths of rivers.
This interesting dynamic leads to some interesting situations in games where you have to decide whether you are going to score the card or potentially increase your points scored by the general layout of your landscape.
If you have played “Calico” and “Cascadia”, then the game plays a little bit like a mix of the two, with the zoning of “Calico” with the point scoring of “Cascadia”. This isn’t a perfect analogy, but in terms of me trying to give you a feel for how the game plays, it’s the best I can do.
It’s a really fun little game, and the components are beautiful, with all of the artwork being absolutely lovely and the wooden tokens are a really nice touch. Oddly, the small orange cubes used to denote when things are cleared do stand out as a bit of a weird outlier. I’m surprised these aren’t also made of wood, which would give the game an even more organic feel. It comes in a relatively small box which contains a lot of game inside.
The game is really simple, and both Toby and Jack completely knew what they were doing and got the strategy. I won both of the games we played, but neither were by much.
I really enjoyed it, and it sits definitely alongside those other two games as great examples of this particular genre. Is it better than those? I would say perhaps not quite, but the fact that the card mechanic means that not everyone is going for the same stuff definitely leads it to be unique and worth replaying.
If you are a big fan of the genre then this is a definite play. If you have games like calico and Cascadia and simply think they are “ok” then this likely isn’t going to convert you…. the art is lovely though.
This copy I received was for review purposes, but as I have to pass it on, I fully intend to buy my own copy if that gives you anything to go by. And I have a feeling that this could do very well in this year’s “Spiel des Jahres”.
