Harmonies

It looks like a mindfulness app. It is not a mindfulness app.

Harmonies hands you a small hex board and a bowl of chunky coloured tokens, and asks you to make a landscape out of them. Grey stacks into mountains, brown and green become trees, blue runs through as water, yellow spreads out into fields. The animal cards carry Maëva Da Silva's artwork, which is soft and storybook and entirely unlike the sharp little optimisation puzzle sitting underneath it. Libellud published Johan Benvenuto's design in 2024 and it has barely stopped moving off the shelf since.

The whole thing hangs on one rule: you take three tokens from a pool and you must place all three. No holding one back for a better turn, no quietly discarding the one you didn't want. Stacking is tightly restricted — grey only goes on grey, water and fields refuse to be built on at all — so the board closes in on you faster than it looks like it will. Animal cards demand specific arrangements, and you commit to them before you know whether the tokens will show up. By the back half of the game you are placing a token somewhere that actively costs you, because everywhere else is worse. Nearer forty-five minutes than thirty once people start counting.

Perfect for: The sort of person who buys a house plant for the look of it and finds themselves reading about soil drainage at midnight. It arrives as a pretty thing and quietly becomes a project.

1–4 players | 30–45 minutes | Age 10+

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