Sagani, is the name Swiss doctor and philosopher Paracelsus gave to natures spirits of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Welcome to Sagani, where achieving harmony between these natural elements is the central goal for these spirits that populate this world. But what is the big question left unanswered? Well… What is the origin of the harmonious melodies forged into sound disc that awaken these spirits?
Armonia aims to answer this all-important question as you play as cute little gnomes, furry yetis, jumping cyc-hops and a wet but happy octis. Aiming to complete tasks in the temple of clouds to forge those important newly found melodies into sound discs and let the true Armonious magic unfold.
Opening up into a colourful world
Armonia comes in a very small compact little box, reflective of the very few components inside. Armonia comes with a board, dice grid (to be explained later), sets of coloured discs, and task cards, and 7 dice. The card components feel sturdy and are full of colour. All of this fits snuggly in the compact box and feels like the packaging was well judged.
The instruction manual is only 8 pages, including images, and although is a bit wordy, covers the rules of the game in a clear manner that makes picking up this game very quick and simple.
Gameplay
Gameplay is simple, in fact, if you have ever played any dice game that involves groups of numbers or runs of numbers (yes like Yahtzee), you will pick this up in no time.
You set the board with and the dice grid nearby. The dice grid is not necessarily required but is an extremely useful little tool.
Each player then places coloured discs on to the board, with player 2, 3 and 4 getting a slight alteration to starting places to offset first player advantages. You then shuffle the task cards and place two at the ned of every path (there are six in total), face down so no one knows what the task is. You are then ready to play! – yes that is all the set up done.
Who goes first? Well, that depends on who cannot help themselves hum or sing along with tunes, which is often very much one particular half of Peaches and Meeples in our home.
Gameplay is simple to start. You roll all seven dice. You then place them in the grid if you chose to and decide which ones you want to keep and which to re-roll. You get three re-rolls in total, so just like Yahtzee, you have to be careful what you pass up and what you keep. Thankfully, Armonia doesn’t score points, but to start with, you do need to get so many of each number to get your discs from one side of the board to the other. For example, roll four or more 6’s, and you can take your disc on path 6 straight to the end, only get three 6’s and you can only make it part way. To then complete your path, you would then need two more 6’s. This applies to all six paths.
Once you have a disc at the end of the path, you then flip the first task card. This is where things change, you are no longer looking for a particular number of each number but trying to re-create the shape using the dice you roll! This sounds easy but can remarkably be more difficult than it sounds when you are also trying to complete other tasks or get other discs from one end to the other. Complete a task, and then you show the next task. Complete that task and your sound disc is forged. The aim is forging 4 or more discs to win.
Orientation when completing tasks matters! You must be able to create the shape as it looks on the cards, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have extra dice next to your shape potentially completing other tasks – or nailing those important numbers to get discs across the paths.
Final thoughts
Play wise, Armonia is incredibly simple. You could confidently teach this to anyone, and it doesn’t take much brain power to play. It does revolve a lot around luck and by carefully selecting which dice to risk and which not to. If you like games which involve chucking dice and matching patterns or number quantities, this game is worth checking out. Theme wise, it is irrelevant. The theme has no real baring on the game but holds more importance to a larger world built with its companion game (and much bigger sibling), Sagani, another game by Uwe Rosenberg well worth checking out.
Games average around 40-45 minutes, so for little compact game, this is decent. Of course, this time can be affected by more players and players taking more time to think between rolls.
Given the simple rule set, you most definitely could teach this to a younger crowd, so possibly a great game for families, looking for something bit different. It doesn’t hurt that the creatures on the box are quite cute! It also has plenty of replayability due to the randomly placed task cards, which you have more in the box than are ever used in a single game, so you do get variety between games.
If you like chance-based dice rolling games, with an element of race in there, Armonia is a good pick and works well for weeknights given its very quick set up and tear down.
If we had one thing to highlight that is a bit disappointing, is that with all the colour in the game artwork, you only get a set of bland white dice to play with. This seems a missed opportunity to have colourful dice, which lead us to buying new dice for the game.
Peaches and Meeples
We are Peaches and Meeples, busy professionals who love to chill out to fun tabletop games. We love board games, card games, miniatures games, competitive or co-operative. Put some dice in our hands and we are in our happy place.
We are also proud guinea pig parents to two lovely fluffballs of joy.
Scores
Rating
80%
Ratings
Artwork 5
Complexity 1
Replayability 4
player interaction 3
component quality 4
You might like
· Small compact game that does not take up much space
· Simple rules that can be learnt quickly
· Cute creature artwork
· Simple dice chucking fun – with similarities to Yahtzee in how dice are used.
Might not like
· The game being colourful, the bland white dice stand out (we swapped ours with more colourful ones).
· Luck rules! It is hard to be ‘good’ at this game, as if you have bad dice rolls, you just have no way to mitigate this.
