Harmonies crescendo has been announced looks like sometime this fall, it comes out.

[loungelizard24]

Harmonies crescendo has been announced this new expansion does not seem to add new animals but new placement rules.

For example one such card pictures a windmill in a field and a clay token on top of a wood token on top of a wood token on top of a yellow field token.

[tbhp]

At first glance, this seems less interesting than the other expansion. While the other adds more synergies to the game, this one looks like it'll just give players additional points for completing those constructions.

Granted, this can add some versatility to the game, but I'm not a fan of when players focus on terrain points (you see that a lot with water, and buildings to a lower extent).

It seems that different players have different ways of thinking about the score in the game. Some players like me seem to focus on finding synergies and completing their animal points, adding additional terrain points only as a last resort, whereas some players seem to think of the two separately, and may compensate depending on how the game goes. For example they may start out aiming for 50 animals points and 50 terrain points, but then seeing they aren't getting good cards, may go for a 40/60 split instead. Or maybe they saw a lot of blues or reds coming and decided to exploit that.

It seems that this new expansion caters more to those who like to work on terrain points independently, while the other expansion is all about animal cards and synergies.

[lenaalethea]

I recently received my copy of the Crescendo expansion, and played it once so far. I do think it adds more options for gameplay and scoring for players who want to switch it up. The challenge really is how to fit everything on the board.

The Sanctuaries and Whisper cards are completely new elements in the game. They provide more ways to earn you points depending on the tile placements. They also give you new boards (side C and D) with different terrain rules (eg. side C requires buildings to be surrounded by 4 different colors instead of just 3, BUT gives you 8 points instead of just the usual 5).

I'd have to play it a bit more to fully appreciate its benefits, I think. Still, I enjoyed my first run with it. I believe it's a good interesting expansion, and is worth a try.

[LeLion92]

I have just bought Crescendo today.

It is a very rich extension which adds many new rules.

(1) Sanctuaries: they are specific 4-chips vertical builds, that you can take instead of an animal in your 4 personal spots. If you manage to build one, it scores 3 points per adjacent chip of the right colors and it automatically completes any last cube of your animal cards of these colors. Huge impact on the game!

(2) Face C board: large board (26 hex) with a hole in the middle. Buildings now score 8 pts but need 4 colors around.

(3) Face D board: large board (25 hex) with a dry/wet theme. Fields and forests can score higher points but need to be adjacent to rivers.

(4) "Murmure" animals (sorry I only have the rules in French, I don't know how they will call them in English): they are mini-animals who are drawn and played the same way as classic animals BUT they can co-exist on the same tile as them. A murmure cube is 2 points alone and 5 points if on the same tile as a classic animal.

So much to explore!

[LeLion92]

After 15 games with the expansion, here are some early comments.

(1) Combining the whole package (new board, sanctuaries, whispers and spirits) seems a bit overwhelming at first. The game is less predictable and it becomes difficult to assert that a move is intrinsically better than another given the larger range of things that may come next. Sometimes I had to "let it go" not to burn my brain and just accept to play suboptimally. The very best players will probably find the game has gained some new depth, but most of us may find the luck factor has increased a bit, as you cannot control everything at the same time.

(2) The sanctuaries are disappointing. Freezing a hex and 4 tiles is actually a big cost, if you consider the land points and animals you could have done with them. And the reward is not that high, given that good players will pick animals carefully and build their game to finish most of them by their own. Maybe I have not found the right approach yet, but so far I tend to simply ignore sanctuaries if I want to play competitively with the expansion.

(3) In the opposite, the whispers are very strong. Their required land patterns are very easy to match, and scoring 4 to 10 points is actually very impactful and above the win/lose gap in most games. Besides they create their own lot of combos with animals (however they also add extra cards to the deck so decrease the probability to draw the classical combos between animals: if you play with Pulse and Crescendo together, it is much harder for a pingouin to find a manta or a bee to find a fox...).

(4) The new boards are very fun. Set aside the new scoring rules, the simple thing to have new shapes is sufficient to renew the game quite much and break your routines. At this stage, I consider these new boards are the best addition from Crescendo. You can totally enjoy to play a classical game (no whispers no sanctuaries) on these boards.

(5) A thing that I find a bit annoying is that the illustrations of the sanctuaries and whispers tend to be a bit more abstract than those of the animals, so we may have a hard time referring to them in the forum. When I say "squirrel" everyone knows which card I am talking about without ambiguity. But if I say "wooden house" it could refer to several different sanctuaries. And "flowers" to several whispers. Maybe we will have to define an official naming convention. Or we will use terms such as "the green-red sanctuary", which is practical but lacks a bit of poetry...

Curious to read your own views if you gave it a try already!