Harmonies — A Tactile, Serene but Challenging 3D Puzzle

I initially bought this entirely for the gorgeous tarot-sized art, but the actual 3D landscape puzzle turned out to be a massive hit. Stacking mountain chains and lining up trees to trigger overlapping animal habitats is pure spatial bliss — just make sure you don’t draft three animals that all fight over the same building spot. A wonderfully tranquil, tactical drafting game that we immediately upgraded with custom acrylic tokens because standard plastics cubes felt like a crime against this level of artwork.

Enjoyment: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Replayability: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rules: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆
Complexity: ⭐⭐⭐☆☆
Luck ─────■── Skill

The main reason I bought this? The absolutely stunning artwork. Every single animal illustration is gorgeous, and the oversized tarot cards give the art the exact canvas it deserves. Add in the high-quality wooden terrain tokens, chunky cardboard player boards, and a thoughtfully designed insert that easily fits sleeved cards and the Pulse expansion content, and you have an exceptional production package right out of the box.

And that’s just the surface. As we quickly realized, the actual gameplay easily matches the visual polish.

The Spatial Puzzle: Drafting, Stacking & 3D Habitats

At its core, the turn loop is blissfully simple:

  1. Draft one of the five available sets of three wooden terrain tokens
  2. Place them onto your personal hexagonal landscape
  3. Optionally draft an animal card from the central market (up to a maximum limit of four active cards)
  4. When you build the habitat pattern shown on an animal card, place an animal cube onto the designated terrain space

The real brilliance lies in the verticality. You aren’t just laying tiles flat on a grid; you are stacking tokens into a 3D landscape. Trees require brown wood trunks topped with green foliage, mountain ranges chain together up to three tokens high to score maximum points, and fields only yield victory points when arranged in connected pairs.

Mid-game board state with custom acrylic tokens (because they make the game even better)

The Harmony Constraint: Overlap vs. Token Contention

The most deeply satisfying puzzle in Harmonies is creating overlapping habitats — finding patterns that allow a single river or tree token to simultaneously satisfy requirements for multiple animal cards.

However, there is a crucial strategic trap to navigate: animal markers cannot share the same physical token.

Drafting three different animal cards that all incorporate buildings sounds great on paper, but if all three require you to place their cube directly onto a building token, you will rapidly clog your limited real estate. Balancing interlocking patterns with available cube placement spots turns a relaxing draft into a crunchy, deeply rewarding optimization puzzle.

Mid-game board with the original animal marker cubes and a very bad choice of animals because both need to go on buildings (and I had a third one as well – don’t do that!)

Spirits of Nature & the Pulse Expansion

The game comes with its very own expansion included: Nature Spirits, which add asymmetric scoring goals and variable player incentives to your board.

While these spirits add a wonderful layer of strategic depth and asymmetric direction, the base game works brilliantly on its own. I strongly recommend playing at least two or three sessions without the expansion cards first. Getting comfortable with the base 3D elevation rules, field pairings, and cube allocation limits makes adding the asymmetric spirit scoring far smoother later on.

There is also an actual expansion, Pulse, though it is tiny. It does, however, add some additional animals with more complex, three color habitats. Fun and cute and my brother will pout for the rest of the game if you steal his axolotl, but also additional complexity I wouldn’t add in the first few rounds.

Some of the nature spirits (including the dino promo card) with matching acrylic tokens

Table Experience & Quality-of-Life Upgrades

  • 2-Player Dynamics: So far, we have played this exclusively with two players, where it shines as a wonderfully tranquil, low-stress duel. We never felt the need to aggressively hate-draft tiles — just some friendly ribbing whenever someone snagged the other person’s favorite animal. In all our 2-player runs, the end-game trigger was always a player running out of open board spaces (two or fewer empty slots) rather than emptying the token bag.
  • Custom Acrylic Animal Tokens: After our very first round, we immediately ordered custom acrylic animal tokens to replace the generic plastic cubes. They feature animal illustrations matching the game’s actual artwork with color-matched backgrounds, letting you see exactly which animal is living on which terrain tile at a glance. It adds a few extra seconds to setup when digging through the token tray, but the visual upgrade on the table is 100% worth it.
We keep the tokens sorted by color – in matching bags in the box and in token trays on the table – to make finding the right ones a bit easier

The Verdict

Harmonies is an absolute gem. It delivers a calming, tactile aesthetic paired with a crunchy, multi-layered 3D optimization puzzle that keeps you coming back for just one more round.

  • Buy it if: You love visual/spatial engine builders, want a soothing yet strategic 2-player drafting game, and appreciate top-tier card art and tactile components
  • Skip it if: You require aggressive direct-conflict interaction, dislike multi-variable pattern optimization, or hate spatial grid constraints

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