Harmonies Board Game Review

In Libellud’s 2024 release Harmonies, players build 3‑D landscapes on personal boards to attract animals. A central board displays sets of three colored tokens and five face‑up animal cards. On your turn, you must take one set of three tokens and add them to your board, take one animal card, and place cubes on completed habitats. Tokens are stacked to form terrain features—such as mountains, trees, fields, and buildings—and the patterns on animal cards specify which arrangements will allow you to place an animal cube. Play continues until the pouch of tokens is empty or a player has two or fewer empty spaces. (Access complete rules here)

Harmonies quickly caught the attention of players and critics alike, earning accolades from the Swiss Gamers Awards in 2024 and is a 2025 Lys Initié Finalist. Harmonies is the first solo design by Johan Benvenuto. On the French podcast Tu Joeus ou Quoi recorded at the 2025 Sommet des Jeux, Benvenuto said that he has been a full‑time game designer for about thirteen years after discovering modern board games in the early 2010s, citing titles like Seven Wonders, Pandemic, and Ticket to Ride as those games that drew him into game design.  Benvenuto was associated with such games as the Cortex series, Lost Seas, Downtown Farmers’ Market, Secret Identity, and Cowboy Bebop: Space Serenade.

My first experience with Harmonies came at 2025’s GAMA Expo and it has come to be a family favorite.  It is a beautiful game that encourages the development of spatial reasoning, strategic thinking, and pattern recognition to create habitats for the animals that populate the game’s world. The game accommodates 1-4 players, runs about 30 minutes, and is rated for 10+, though I believe it might work with slightly younger kids (I’ll update this if necessary). The random nature of the cards, the draw of tokens, and player strategies all contribute to the game’s replayability.

Additionally, Harmonies can serve as a springboard for discussions of our role as stewards of the earth and the responsibility to maintain environments that encourage the flourishing of all creation, or just enjoy looking at the cute animal cards.