Harmonies rules refresher

Read the refresher

Your aim is to score the most points by building a landscape of colored tokens on your personal board and settling animals into it. You do that by taking tokens three at a time, stacking them into terrain, and matching the habitat patterns shown on your animal cards.

For setup, the central board goes out on the two to four player side, and each of its five spaces gets three tokens drawn blind from the pouch. Five animal cards go faceup beside it, with the rest as a draw pile and the animal cubes in a general reserve. Everyone takes a personal board, and all players must use the same side, plus the matching reminder card. Point the arrow on the central board at the first player.

Turns go clockwise. On your turn you must take and place tokens exactly once, and you may optionally take one animal card, once per turn, and place animal cubes as often as you can. You choose the order, and the optional actions can be squeezed in between placing one token and the next. At the end of your turn, draw three tokens from the pouch to refill the space you emptied, and top the animal row back up to five faceup cards.

The mandatory action is this: take all three tokens from any one space of the central board, and place all three on your personal board however you like. A token can always go on an empty space. It can be stacked on one or two already placed tokens, but only to form the legal terrain types. A green token on zero, one, or two brown tokens makes a tree of height one, two, or three. One to three gray tokens make a mountain. A red token on a brown, gray, or red token makes a building. No other stacking is allowed. You can never slide a token underneath existing tokens, and you can never place on a space occupied by an animal cube.

Taking an animal card means picking one of the five faceup cards and putting it above your board, then immediately taking cubes from the reserve to fill every space on that card. You may have at most four cards above your board at once.

To place an animal cube, recreate that card's habitat pattern exactly somewhere on your board. It may be in any orientation, but tree and mountain heights must match exactly, and for buildings the bottom token can be red, brown, or gray. The space where the cube goes must be unoccupied. Then take the bottommost cube from the card and set it on that token. One token can serve as part of several habitats at once. A cube placement is permanent, even if you later change the terrain so the pattern no longer exists. When the last cube comes off a card, set that card beside your board as complete, and it no longer counts toward your four card limit.

The game ends when the pouch is empty and you need to refill the central board, or when at the end of someone's turn they have two or fewer unoccupied spaces on their board. Finish the round so everyone has had the same number of turns. Then score. Trees and mountains score more the taller they are, one point at height one, three at height two, and seven at height three, but a mountain scores zero unless it is adjacent to another mountain. Each field, meaning a contiguous group of two or more yellow tokens, is worth five, and a bigger blob is still just one field. Each building is worth five, but only if the top tokens on the adjacent spaces show at least three different colors, otherwise nothing. On side A, blue tokens form rivers: count only your longest one, measured by the shortest path from end to end, scoring nothing for a single token and rising to fifteen for six, plus four more for each token beyond the sixth. On side B, blue tokens instead divide your board into islands, five points each, and you always have at least one. Each animal card, complete or not, scores the number shown in the topmost space that has no cube left on it, so a card with all its cubes still on it scores zero. Most points wins. Ties go to the player who placed the most animal cubes, and if still tied, those players share the victory.

A turn, played out

You have 3 animal cards above your board. The central space nearest you holds 1 green, 1 red and 1 yellow token, so you take all three. On your board, a lone brown token touches a lone gray one. The green goes on the brown, making a tree of height 2. The red cannot go on yellow, so it goes on the gray, making a building. The yellow goes beside a yellow already down, forming a field worth 5. Now you take a faceup card whose pattern is a height 2 tree beside a building. That is your fourth card, the limit, and you fill its spaces with cubes from the reserve. Your new tree and building match exactly, so the bottommost cube goes on the tree's green top. Last, draw 3 tokens to refill the emptied space and turn up a card so 5 show again.