A tree in Harmonies can help your landscape score and provide part of an animal’s home. Its height helps determine what it scores and which habitats it can join. You build on a small personal board, trying to make the same terrain serve several purposes before the remaining spaces fill up.
How it plays
Each player builds a landscape on a board of hexagonal spaces. On your turn, choose one of five groups of three terrain tokens from the shared display and place all three on your board. Colors become different features: gray tokens make mountains, while a green token on up to two brown tokens makes a tree. Tokens can only stack in specified combinations, and you cannot rearrange them later. Choosing a group for one useful token also means finding places for the other two. The display is refilled randomly from a bag after each turn.
You may also take one animal card per turn, keeping up to four unfinished cards. Each card shows a habitat pattern and holds cubes representing animals. When your terrain matches the pattern, including the pictured tree and mountain heights, you may move a cube from the card onto the corresponding unoccupied token on your board, as indicated by the card. Patterns can rotate, and the same terrain can help several habitats. You can place animals between your token placements, but cannot add terrain on a space occupied by an animal cube. Emptying a card of cubes frees a card slot.
Your landscape and animals both earn points. Taller trees score more, while mountains need another mountain beside them to score at all. Animal cards score according to how many cubes you have moved onto your board, so an unfinished card can still contribute. Building for terrain points can conflict with an animal’s exact habitat pattern: a taller tree will not match a card that needs a shorter one. The game ends when the bag cannot supply a required refill or someone finishes a turn with two or fewer empty spaces. Complete the round so everyone has had equal turns, then add landscape and animal points. The highest total wins.
Solo play uses three token groups and discards the unchosen tokens after each turn. You try to improve your score rather than beat an opponent. The base game also includes a second board side, where water separates islands instead of forming a scoring river, and optional Nature’s Spirit cards that add landscape scoring goals.
Learning the game
Taking three tokens is simple; the learning comes from legal stacks, habitat heights and the different ways terrain scores. A first teaching should show how one animal moves from its card to the board. The rulebook recommends starting on side A and leaving Nature’s Spirit cards out for the first few games.