The Board Game That Makes You Think Twice | Harmonies | My Favourite Games #6

My Favourite Games is a series where I step away from the design diary to share games I genuinely enjoy and find mechanically interesting. No scores, no rankings, just the ideas worth thinking about. Episode #6: Harmonies (2024). My friend Jaime gave me this one as a gift. Finding a game to give someone in our group is genuinely hard, as we already have most of the games we like. This was a good call. Harmonies is a tile-placement game for 2 to 4 players that plays in about 30 minutes. You build a personal landscape from coloured tiles and attract animals onto it. Each animal needs a specific pattern of terrain to settle. The mechanic I find most interesting? You are always scoring in two different ways at the same time. How you arrange your tiles. And which animals you attract. The best placement for your tiles is often not the best placement for your animals. Managing that tension is where the actual decisions live. The rules are simple. The optimisation is not. That combination is hard to pull off in a 30-minute game. (Quick note: I got injured recently, so you will notice a different setup for the next month or so. Nothing serious, I will keep things going from a different position while I recover.) Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:30 What Harmonies is 1:20 The mechanic is worth talking about 2:30 Why it works as a design 3:20 Who is this for 3:55 Close Harmonies on BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4... If you have played it, did you lean more into the terrain patterns or the animals? In my experience, that tells you a lot about how someone plays.