Harmonies is a one to four player game where you collect 3 tokens at a time to build a three dimensional landscape. The goal of this landscape is to create habitats for animals and become home to as many animals as possible to out score your opponents. This cozy open drafting game is easy enough for nongamers while experienced gamers will love its layered game play as they strategize and adapt. Games average around thirty minutes, and are playable by any kid in elementary school on up.

Each turn is filled with several actions that can be performed in any order:

You must select a set from one of the five stacks of three tokens

You must place all three tokens selected on your board

You can select one animal card with a maximum of 4 in your possession, then fill each box on the right side of the card with orange cubes. Make sure that if you remove an animal card, a new one is drawn, to keep the supply of cards at five.

You can also place animals by putting the orange cubes on your landscape, if you have met the requirements.Once you have removed all the cubes on an animal card, you can turn the animal card over, as it has been resolved which frees up another space.

The Reminder card not only shows how tokens score, but it also shows how many tokens of each type are in the bag!  Water is obviously on the high side, but something like red has substantially fewer tokens in the bag, so play accordingly, relying solely on red can leave you falling way behind if you aren’t careful. You can use this to count tokens also, if you need a red, but there are already 12 in play, odds are low (but not zero) that another red will be available on your next turn.

Don’t put Red tokens in the corner - they can’t possibly get the (3) colors they need to score. This should only be done if it helps with a spirit animal or resolving a card, but the landscape points are unattainable.

Pay attention to what other people are planning. If one of your opponents has selected animals that all prefer water, there is a good chance you will be in competition for the water tokens if you are doing the same, and this will lower the pool (#DadJoke) of available tokens for you.

Not all, but some animals can play into themselves, allowing you to get points very easily. An example of this would be the Crow, who for just one additional field token gets you an additional Crow AND allows you to resolve the card. Similar to this are animals that play off each other like the Boar and the Hedgehog. These two structures - stacking animals in the same habitat or sharing a habitat between two different types of animals is the cornerstone of leveling up your play.

When selecting animal cards, it is important to pay attention to the colored strip on the side, it indicates what color of the habitat the animal will actually reside. This becomes incredibly important as you get better, nothing is more frustrating than picking an animal card you can’t really use as intended because while the animals look like they can share the same habitat, they both reside on the same token and thus don’t work together.

It goes without saying, but plan out your moves as far in advance as you can, but always leave room for things to not go according to plan. There WILL be turns where to get the token that you want, you’ll have to pick up a token or tokens (ugh) that you don’t want. This goes for Animal Cards too, there is a limit of four active animal cards, aggressively getting to four, might prevent you from getting a more useful animal later in the game.

Ending the game is a community driven event. You can plan to build all sorts of tall structures to maximize points, but if someone on your right is playing flat with prairie dogs or lots of water, the game will end faster than you may be prepared for. Keep an eye on how many turns are left by counting spaces left on everyone’s board and adjust your game plan accordingly.