How many puzzly abstract games do I actually need in my life? While the answer is N+1, I have to admit that I’ve been holding off on picking up Harmonies for much too long. Harmonies, designed by Johan Benvenuto and published by Libellud in 2024, garnered a lot of praise the year it was released, hitting a lot of peoples top games of the year lists, and even picking up a Spiel des Jahres recommendation and the Golden Geek award of Medium Game of the Year.

To oversimplify Harmonies, think Azul mixed with Cascadia. While that’s woefully underselling the game, it does put you into the right frame of mind. In Harmonies, you’re building a landscape on your personal player board, creating harmonious habitats for the various animals that could call your board home (see what I did there?) That’s largely where the Cascadia influence comes from.

The Azul part comes from the terrain disc market and how terrain discs are distributed. There are 5 market discs, each market gets 3 terrain discs randomly drawn from a bag. On your turn, you simply need to take all the discs from one of those markets, and place them on your board. There’s also a market of 5 animal cards that you can pull from, which will influence how you score points.

I suppose this is another Cascadia feeling part of the game. You’ll earn half your points from the terrain discs on your board, and then the other half of your points come from the animal cards you’ve drafted, depending on how well you’ve catered to their habitat needs.

Each animal card has a pattern of terrain discs that needs to be fulfilled, and a number of times that the pattern can be deployed. If at any point the pattern is present on your board, you move a cube from the card onto the pattern as dictated by the animal card. If there are no more cubes remaining on the card, then you can remove that card from your play area, freeing up a spot to take another animal card.

The cadence of Harmonies is calm, and the puzzle is satisfying. Ideally, you’ll want to pick several animal cards that synergize together well, so you can be working toward multiple cards at the same time. But inevitably, luck will decide if you’ll be able to achieve your goals or not. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten a really great set of animals, all working together off the same terrain features, only for that terrain feature to just never show up.

With that in mind, I feel the need to comment on how little player interaction. In Azul, Cascadia, and others, an important part of being competitive is hate drafting the resources your opponents desperately needs. In Harmonies, the opportunity cost is dramatically high. Taking a card that’s at odds with the terrain you’re building only really hurts you. This isn’t the kind of game that you can win by dragging others down.

Thankfully, Harmonies is short. Once a player fills their player board up until they have 2 or less empty spaces remaining, the round is finished, and the game comes to an end. Not all players will achieve this on the same turn, as certain terrain types do stack. If you get a little screwed by the random chance, it’s real easy to drop everything into the bag and try again.

The production on Harmonies is beautiful. From the art on the cover and tarot sized cards, to the thick, bright wooden discs, Harmonies is a great looking game. And the cardboard insert the game comes with is very functional, which is a welcome treat.

Harmonies deserves all the praise it’s gotten so far. It’s a gorgeous spatial puzzle that’s both soothing and surprisingly demanding. It plays smoothly across player counts, teaches in minutes, and rewards careful planning without becoming punishing, unlike something like Calico. The tactile joy of placing its wooden tokens never really wears off, and the blending of terrain-scoring and pattern-matching keeps my brain pleasantly engaged every time I sit down to enjoy this puzzle.