It's been a little while since I have written a blog suggesting a board game.... well, just blogs in general, but this past week, my in-laws rented a super awesome house down in St. George, and even though it was 110 degrees, we had an awesome time visiting, swimming, shopping, playing games, watching movies and other activities. While we went shopping, I saw a board game store, which makes my attention perk up like a dog smelling a nice, thick T-bone steak, so we went in.
There was a game called Harmonies that I saw that looked like a lot of fun but bought a fun party game to play with the family, which was called "Concept", which is really cool, and probably deserves its own blog post recommendation of its own. Anyway, the second time I went in was to go back and buy the game called "Harmonies".
I learned that it is brand new, and it's made by Libellud games, who is the company that makes the super popular game, "Dixit", which has awesome and surreal artwork where you say a word or phrase to describe a card you play. Then, everyone else plays a card that might fit the same description, and the idea is to get people to guess your card, but not everyone. It's a fun game that the whole family can play. This new game "Harmonies" is a family game, but for those ten and older.
Here is the front of the box!
This game also has incredible artwork, and a lot of variety.
Here is the back of the box...
The back of the box tells you enough about the game, but I will try to describe it as best I can.
In Harmonies, you are trying to use tokens that represent different habitats. There are five altogether. Water, Fields, Wood, Leafs, Mountains and Buildings. All of the tokens are placed in a cloth bag, included in the box. They are then mixed up, and you randomly choose three tokens to place on a board that holds fifteen tokens, so five spots with three tokens each.
On your turn, you must choose and place your three chosen tokens on your own personal board, shown in the picture above. The wood tokens can be stacked to create trees. Mountains can be stacked up on top of each other, although three is the limit, but they represent bigger mountains. The water tokens create rivers and must be played next to one another. The longer your river, and the higher your trees, mountains and buildings, the more points you get. The field tokens don't stack at all.... I am pretty sure, but they help serve as a different purpose.
All of your different habitats you create score you points at the end of the game. Simple, right?
Wrong! Not only must you follow the rules for placing your tokens, but you also then have a choice of one of five cards that represent different animals them. On your turn, after drafting and placing your tokens, you can take an animal card that has small cubes on them. The animal cards also show you what tokens you have to have, and how to lay them out. If you do it right, you get to take cubes off of your drafted animal card, and the more of those animals you create habitats for, and place in them, the more points those animal cards are worth at the end of the game.
Remember when I talked about Dixit having amazing surreal artwork? If you see the picture above, on both pictures, you can see how incredible the artwork is for Harmonies.
When all of the tokens are gone, or someone only has two or less empty spaces on their personal board, the other people who still have a turn that round take their last turn, and then the animal cards are tallied for their points. After the animal points are tallied, you figure out the scores for the habitats you created on your board.
The game is actually easy to understand and how to play. We played our first game almost right out of the box. I have to admit, I used to love getting new board games and reading all of the rules that come in the box, but now that YouTube exists, there are tons of videos that teach you how to play a game, and tons that teach you, and then the people play the game so you can see how it's played, so I have kind of stopped reading rules for the most part, but there are times when we play where I will look something up in the rulebook.
Back to what I was saying, the game is simple to understand. There are only three actions on your turn, and sometimes you only have to only take your three tokens and pass on an animal card or placing an animal cube onto your board in their habitat. The rules are simple, but the fun of the game doesn't come from the easy-to-understand actions.
This game is a unique puzzle kind of game. The decisions you have to make, whether it's trying to pick the right tokens for a habitat, or looking at your board to see what habitat tokens you already have, in connection with looking at the animal cards and seeing if you are close to having a habitat for it live in and score you points at the end of the game is a very delicate balance. If you are too concentrated on habitats, you might risk more points for the animal cards you have, or vice versa. You might be trying to create habitats for a certain animal card you have because if you use all of their cubes, you get a huge point reward, but if the rest of the habitats aren't built up, for example, in one game, I used two river tokens, but they weren't played together, so they were worth zero points at the end of the game.
My stepson, Michael, Lindsey and I were playing, and Michael is kind of funny. It's hard to get him to play a board game over video games, but we sat down with Harmonies, and he likes to talk out loud when he is playing a game. He loves to play card games with Lindsey's dad, and he always talks out what he can and can't do, and it was so fun, and funny, to listen to him talk out loud about all of the different choices he had to make. The turns do go very fast. You aren't rolling dice, and then moving a pawn that many spaces. You are carefully planning out what you need to do or can do to score the most points, and so there is a lot of strategy involved. However, while someone is taking their turn, you can be busy planning your next turn, so it doesn't feel like you have to wait forever for other players to finish before you can start. You can eye tokens you want, or maybe look and see if there is an animal card you can take that will fit well into your habitats that you have been carefully planned out.
We really loved this game, and it's really easy after you finish a game to say, "Let's clear our boards and play again!" I think that once you play your first game of Harmonies, the faster subsequent games go. I buy and collect a lot of board games, and I really love sharing them with you all on my blog. I've had a few games I have reviewed and have had friends telling me that they bought the game, played it and loved it just as much as we do.
This is one of those games where we played it, really enjoyed it, and will probably play it a lot. I really hope you check it out, and no, I am not getting paid by the company to sell this game, we just loved it so much. It's for ages ten and up, and like I say, figuring out the balance between how to build a habitat, and building habitats for your animals is tricky, but feels rewarding as well. It was really fun to see, and hear, Michael, who is 14 years old, talk out his strategies out loud, not really to cheat and screw up his game, but the fact that he was thinking. He had placed his tokens and was trying to figure out the puzzle part of the game where you start trying to balance habitats with animals.
There is also a backside to your player board that has more hexagons for your tokens, but it's an island, and the more spaces you leave in and close off score you island points, but we love the normal game so much, that's what we want to play.
Anyway, I have talked enough about the game now. It's a great one, and I hope you will all check it out if your family likes to play board games from time to time, this one is a huge winner.
I hope you are all doing well and are safe. I care about all of you. I am very tired right now, so I am just heading to bed. Hope to have to read another blog of my later on.
