Harmonies is a wonderful nature inspired game for 1-4 players, where the winner will be the person with the most points once one of the two endgame conditions are met. In the game you will be drafting landscape tokens to place on your player board, optionally taking animal cards, and trying to achieve certain patterns to place animal, or nature spirit, cubes upon in a bid to score the most points.
Setup
Firstly place the central board down with the five spaces side facing up, the other side is for solo play. Next place all the tokens in the pouch and give them a good shake and place 3 random tokens from the bag on each of the 5 spaces. Give each player their own personal board, which has an A or a B side, both with slightly different scoring conditions and all players must choose the same map to play with. Then shuffle the animal cards, and deal 5 face up within reach of the players, alongside the orange cubes. The spirit animal and clear cubes will be set aside for now as are not recommended for your first game and can be added to future plays but I will cover how these work later.
Determine a first player, and point the central board point towards them. This is important because once the end of the game has been triggered, you will see out the round to ensure all players have taken an equal number of turns.
How does it play
On your turn you will take one mandatory action, and a possible optional actions. The mandatory action is to take three tiles from one space on the central board, and place them onto your player board. You can place them anywhere on your board, and they do not have to be adjacent. You cannot place a tile under another tile, or on top of an animal but it can be placed on top of other tiles and which tiles it can be placed on is shown in the rulebook.
The first optional action is to take an animal card and fill the score slots with the corresponding number of cubes on the card. You are allowed to have up to four animal cards which still have cubes on them at any one time, and once you complete the exact pattern as shown on an animal card, you remove a cube and place it onto your player board in the matching position as shown on the card, moving the card facedown and opening up a slot for a new card to go in.
You can now as an optional action remove an animal cube from a card every time you have replicated that pattern on your board, or when you create it going forward, noting it can be in any orientation but that all parts of the habitat must be of the correct height and that the space the animal is going on to is unoccupied. This is important as the more cubes you remove from cards, the more pointsr they will score.
End of the game
The game will end when one of two conditions have been triggered. Either a player has two or fewer spaces left on their player board, or if the bag is empty. Although having played Harmonies a lot I tend to find the empty space rule triggers the end of the game in almost all cases. You will then total up the points for each of habitats you have created based on the side of the map you have chosen, followed by all of the points for the animal cards, either completed or to the highest removed cube. The winner will be the player with the most points.
Nature’s Spirit Cards
Once you are familiar with Harmonies, you can add in Nature’s Spirit Cards. To do this, shuffle these cards and hand two to each player facedown. You then choose one of the two cards and place it face up in front of you before the game begins. This will then count towards your 4 card limit until it is completed but instead of orange cubes, use the clear cubes for these cards and score them in the same way as the other animal cards at the end of the game. These are more complex than the animal cards and will offer you additional scoring based on either the number of landscapes on your personal board or connect types of different habitats depending on the Spirit.
Hopefully you now know enough to get you going with Harmonies, the player aids will have the various scoring conditions for the habitats and specific rules as to what tiles can be placed on what, and the rulebook has clarification on the Nature’s Spirit cards as well as a solo mode for you to explore!
