Harmonies

You draft little wooden habitat tokens onto your own board, stacking them into these small colored landscapes, then take animal cards that score points for specific patterns of what you’ve built. It’s simple to describe and it takes maybe five minutes to get anyone playing, which I appreciate more than I used to now that I’m not always gaming with people who read rulebooks for fun.

Everyone reaches for the Cascadia comparison and it’s a fair one, same drafting bones underneath, but this feels tighter to me, more combo-forward. When an animal card’s scoring condition lines up perfectly with a shape you’d already half built, it clicks in a way that feels earned rather than lucky, even though I’ll admit the luck of which cards show up does matter more than the box lets on.

Now the part I can’t let go of. The wooden tokens are a genuinely awkward shape to pick up off a smooth board, I’ve fumbled them more than any component in recent memory, and I’m someone who spends a fair amount of time handling old and new things side by side for a living, so that’s not nothing. A few copies out there reportedly arrived with boards that had a slight warp right out of the box, not mine thankfully, but I keep an eye on the corners every time I put it away flat under something heavy, habit from handling worse. The cards themselves run thin too, thin enough that I sleeved mine within a week, which I don’t usually bother doing for a filler-weight game.

None of that stops it being one of the prettiest things on my shelf, and the animal-card theming, where the scoring pattern actually reflects something true about how that animal lives, is a nicer piece of design than a game this size usually bothers with. I just wish the object matched the idea a little better.