What do you add to a game that already seemed complete?

This is the first "Innesto" (Integration). While "Meccanismo" (Mechanism) explains why a game exists and what it says about you, "Innesto" focuses on something more practical: when a game returns—an expansion, a re-release, a new language—what truly changes, and whether it's worth it for you. No hype, no press releases with a frog on them. Just: do you need it, or not? We start with the smallest possible return: a single pack.

We called it relaxing. It was always a puzzle.

You remember it for its colors. The wooden tokens you draw from the bag, the small landscapes rising in height, the amber cubes of animals settling where you've built the right thing. Harmonies arrived in 2024 — Johan Benvenuto on design, Maëva Da Silva on art — and the Spiel des Jahres jury listed it among their recommended titles. We all welcomed it as the gentle game, the one you can even play with non-gamers.

But its difficulty has always been in one place. You have a hexagonal board that closes when you have two spaces left, and each animal card asks for a precise color pattern. One token can serve multiple animals at once, and space is never enough. Beneath the beautiful colors, Harmonies is a silent struggle for space. And that struggle was just waiting for someone to tighten it a little more.

"Harmonies is a symphony of patterns: everyone composes their landscape like a painting." Johan Benvenuto, author

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It adds one color. It brings everything else with it.

Pulse is exactly that: a small pack. Ten new animal cards, a reminder card, a small rule sheet. Still illustrated by Maëva Da Silva, they look like pieces of the base game left in a drawer. It promises "more complex patterns, without changing the rules." This is true, literally. But "without changing the rules" does not mean "without changing anything at the table." It changes a lot at the table.

Until yesterday, a pattern asked for a maximum of two colors. These now ask for three.

The Integration · Expansion 3 The colors a pattern can now demand. Before, two were enough. 2 → 3 colors per pattern · +10 cards · 2024 → 2026

It seems like little. One more color. Except that in Harmonies, colors don't behave the same way: green climbs on brown and becomes a tree, grays stack into mountains, each occupies space in its own way. Putting three different behaviors in the same cluster of hexes means blocking more rigid spaces, and overlapping that pattern with other cards becomes really difficult.

And here's the unexpected twist: the new cards don't create the difficulty. The old ones do. They now compete more fiercely for the same hexes, because every three-color animal consumes more varied and less flexible space. No rule has changed. The mathematics of space has changed—and the board, in Harmonies, has always been the real rulebook.

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For some, it's not an addition. It's a subtraction.

If you've played the base game to death and wished it had more bite, Pulse does exactly that. But if you liked Harmonies because it was light, beautiful, and cleared your head after a bad day—leave it where it is. Pulse pushes the game in the opposite direction: more planning, more analysis paralysis, nothing resolved instinctively. For you, it's not an addition. It's a subtraction: it fills your head with what Harmonies used to empty. And that's fine, there's nothing to redeem.

And here's the question that the low price makes you overlook. It costs very little: you add it to your cart without thinking. But first, ask yourself an honest question—with Pulse, do you think you'd play Harmonies more? Would it make you return to a game you had put away? If so, then these ten cards are money well spent. But if you only get it because it's cheap, it will end up mixed into the deck of a game you pull out three times a year: you'll encounter it rarely, and when you do, it will make the evening harder, not different.

Ultimately, the question is one, and it's the most practical one there is.

More difficult isn't better for everyone. And your answer says more about you than about the pack.