In Harmonies, every turn adds three landscape tokens to your own board. You are building two things at once: terrain that scores on its own and exact habitat patterns that let Animal cards score. This walkthrough uses the original 2024 Libellud game; the expansions are optional.
Set up the shared display
Put the central board on its multiplayer side, fill each of its five spaces with three random tokens from the pouch, and reveal five Animal cards. All players choose the same side of their personal boards. Side A scores a river and is the publisher’s recommended first game; Side B scores islands instead. Keep Nature’s Spirit cards aside for the first few plays as the rulebook suggests.
What you can do on a turn
- Required once: take all three tokens from one space of the central display and place all three legally on your board. You choose their destinations and placement order.
- Optional once: take one of the five face-up Animal cards if you have room for it. Put the indicated Animal cubes on its track.
- Optional any number of times: whenever a habitat pattern is present, move a cube from one of your cards to the corresponding token in that habitat.
You may interleave the optional actions with the three token placements. For example, place a token that completes a habitat, settle an Animal, then place your next token. At the end of your turn refill the empty group with three tokens and restore the Animal display to five cards where possible.
Build legal landscapes
Tokens can go on an empty space or atop one or two existing tokens to make the permitted trees, mountains and buildings. A tree is green above zero, one or two brown tokens; a mountain is one to three gray tokens; a building is a red token above brown, gray or red. Blue water and yellow fields occupy their normal single-token spaces. You cannot put a token beneath an existing stack or on a space occupied by an Animal cube. Consult the player reminder for the stack drawings.
Match a habitat exactly
An Animal card’s diagram specifies terrain colors and the landing token for its cube. Rotate the pattern to any orientation, but match the displayed tree and mountain heights exactly. In the original base game, do not assume a mirror image is allowed merely because a rotation is. The building bottom may be brown, gray or red. The target token must be free for the Animal cube.
Take the bottommost cube from the Animal card when placing one. A terrain token can contribute to more than one habitat, and a settled Animal stays in place if later construction changes the pattern. When the final cube leaves a card, set that completed card aside: it no longer uses one of your four active card spaces. A partially completed card still scores at the end.
Know when the game ends
The end is triggered if the pouch is empty when you need to refill the central display, or if your board has two or fewer unoccupied spaces at the end of your turn. Complete the current round so everyone has played the same number of turns. Add landscape and Animal points; the most points wins. A tie goes to the player with more Animal cubes on the board, then remains shared.
First-game example
Suppose you have a card requiring a height-two tree beside water. You draft brown, green and blue together. Place brown on an empty space, green on top to form the height-two tree, and blue beside it. You may settle an Animal immediately if the printed landing position is free. The same tree can later help another card, provided its exact pattern still matches at the moment you place that card’s cube.
Most common mistake: treating a nearly correct habitat as sufficient. Check the stack height and the indicated landing token before taking a cube off a card.
Continue: Harmonies guide · How to play · Strategy · Scoring · Pulse and Crescendo expansions
Rules source: Libellud’s English base-game rulebook. This guide covers the base game unless an expansion is named.