Dorfromantik (2022)

It is a genuinely strong concept from a small development team based in Berlin. I first discovered it on the Switch and started playing it there. It works as a harmless pastime: you place a tile, build something gradually, and it gives off a slight Tetris-like or puzzle-laying feeling. At its core, it is a card- and tile-placement game, and it works quite well in that format.

What makes it especially interesting is that it also exists as a physical board game. My partner and I actually discovered that version first. As a board game, I find it even slightly more appealing. The tactile element adds a noticeable layer to the experience. Handling the tiles physically gives the game an additional warmth and presence that the digital version cannot fully replicate.

The digital edition is very well made and visually charming, but the physical tiles create a distinct atmosphere. Overall, the game’s defining quality is its charm. It does not try to do more than it sets out to do, yet what it does, it does effectively. It is simple, sweet, and consistently appealing in its execution.

Had this game on my Steam's wishlist for ages before finally purchasing it during the winter sale's. My only regret is not buying it before. I've been dealing with crippling anxiety these last few weeks and the calmness of Dorfromantik finally brought me some piece of mind. I sat down for about three hours playing it, listening to some comedy podcast and just loving every minute of it. It made me forget about my anxiety, even if for a few hours, rotating tiles and creating beautiful landscapes.

I can't thank it enough.

A beautiful puzzle games based on tiles. Nothing really challenging, unless you want to make the most beautiful map with almost all perfect positioned tiles (which is a goal i recommend).

It is a quiet game, that you can launch during your trips in a train, or your weekend vacation, just to pass time... this is what i do, this game will certainly stay on my HD for a long time.

Normally video games get made after board games, but Dorfromantik went the opposite direction and has now won Board Game Of The Year 2023 in Germany.

I can highly recommend both. The video game is 90+% pure chill, the board game is what the people at the table want it to be: A chill co-op experience or a high risk, high reward game and it is easy to understand for kids (age 8+) and people who do not usually play board games.

If you want to know where a couple hours of your time went because you completely zoned out into tiny villages, forest, rivers and fields, you've been lost into Dorfromantik.

It's an amazing meditative tile-placement game, super beautiful, super simple and intelligent. It completely takes you on a journey and you don't want it to end. Or maybe you want, because it's already been 3 hours in a row and your hand feels sore. But you'll leave with a smile and the utter impression you've been dreaming.

The soundtrack is beyond amazing. It's emotional, comforting, moving. It's supporting you in the game, and a really big part of the experience.

Yeah, I guess that's what Dorfromantik is, an experience.

The only critic I have is when you start getting good at it (eheh, just me bragging), each game lasts longer and longer (a few hours), and as its requires a fairly intense focus it becomes a bit exhausting.

Hours played : 70 hours (for now)

(This is a mini-review as part of my holiday project to try out as many games on my wishlist during the Steam Sales, and then getting them refunded if I don't think I will play them. In short: demo time!)

Played: 80 mins

Evaluation: This is a nice implementation of a chill tile-laying game. The landscapes are really cute and pretty, the game plays smoothly and I guess I had fun playing it. I played it quite some time, but I have the feeling I would play it for 2-3 hours and then never start it up again. These relaxed games are just not really what I'm looking for in a game.

Price: 9,09 EUR

Is it a keeper? No (but I feel bad about it)

I've been struggling more than usual lately with games that have complex tutorials and interfaces, micromanagement, that sort of thing. With its impressively clear, streamlined UI/UX and visual language, Dorfromantik thankfully represents the opposite of that kind of experience, while still delivering a fun loop of planning, strategy, and self-expression.

It couldn't be simpler to place the game's randomly-provided tiles and build out big villages, forests, railroads, rivers, and... colored rocks (?) on the new canvas you get each round. Much like a jigsaw puzzle, it's pretty satisfying to find the perfect piece you've been looking for to fill a tricky spot, or to link two similar zones together. Equally satisfying is getting something that doesn't fit anywhere and making something work out of it. It's a good fundamental design born out of pseudo-randomness.

Besides your personal aesthetic goals for the big map you're building out, the game is smartly driven by its "quest" system. The quests can easily be ignored but add interesting medium-term goals to think about as you ponder your current turn in the short term. Completing quests then gives you more tiles, extending the game based on how much effort you want to put in. I like how this design captures some of the fun of big simulation and strategy games in a more bite-sized way.

The game executes its core ideas well, but doesn't have a lot beyond that. What you see in your first session seems to be more or less what you get with this game beyond coming up with new ideas and strategies on your own. Some will consider this a flaw, while others will consider it a great positive when looking for something simple. I think it could stand to have something a bit more structured to keep me coming back, but wouldn't want to complicate the formula too much.

The game hit for me at a good time and provides a nice calm, fun time that does not ask much of you while giving a decent amount back. It's actually so chill that while playing today, an achievement sound went off and made me jump in my seat like a ghost had suddenly popped up or something... I only wish it were available on iPad/mobile where it would be much more at home and easier to pick up and play.

• Rating: 9.3/10
• Hours played: about 5 so far
• Year played: 2022

I've had my eye on this game for a while, patiently waiting for it to come out of early access. I didn't really know much about the gameplay going in, but I generally enjoy tile placement games, and they had my attention with the minimalist style and the german-language title.

The gameplay loop is quite simple. You have a stack of hexagonal tiles, of which you can only play the top one, and aim to place them in a way that creates unbroken sections of different biomes and other features. Forests next to forests, houses next to houses, and so on. You don't have to connect same-to-same, but you get bonus points (which adds more tiles to your stack) when every edge of a tile lines up correctly.

Some tiles also come along with simple quests, such as "make this tile part of a group of exactly 5 houses". Completing these also grants bonus points and additional tiles. To make your layout decisions more complex, you'll also get tiles with railroad or river segments, which can only be placed such that they connect with an adjacent segment. You need to plan ahead where you might want to put a railroad, or you'll be stuck with tracks going nowhere.

When playing in the main game mode, you occasionally unlock achievements which give you new tiles, or cosmetic reskins of existing tiles which will sometimes appear in place of the standard one in your stack, giving your maps more variety. But these are mostly just extra bonuses, since they don't grant points or additional tiles, so you don't need to feel stressed or obligated to achieve them.

Each game ends when your stack is depleted, but with enough thoughtful placement, you can continue replenishing your stack for hours by completing quests and watching your villages and landscapes grow and come to life. Boats start sailing around your lakes and rivers, trains show up and travel back and forth along the tracks. As the game goes on, you begin to feel attached to your little villages and landscapes, thinking about the people who might live there, what the city you built might be like to live in, whether it really needs another train station or if you should fill it up with housing instead. At the end of the game you have the option to continue your map in creative mode, where you can freely generate new tiles or discard unwanted ones.

After my first game I was so attached to my map that I immediately went into creative mode and spent the next couple hours filling out all the missing slots and finishing the grand plans I had come up with for where to put everything. It felt just as satisfying and relaxing as playing the main game mode.

There's something to be said for a game which is such a joy to play that you don't need any external pressure from achievements, loot, leaderboards, or anything else to make it feel rewarding (although those features are there, just de-emphasized and in the background). The act of placing the tiles and seeing your creation grow is so pleasant in itself that it really doesn't need anything more, and it's not an easy thing as a game developer to know when to say "that's enough features", but the Toukana Interactive team (a group of 4 german students!) knew exactly where to draw the line. I'm thrilled to see this game doing well, and I'm excited to see more from this studio in the future. In the meantime, Dorfromantik will stay installed on my steam deck as my new go-to game for unwinding at the end of a long day.

Dorfromantik is, conceptually, extremely simple. You are presented with six-sided pieces, and your goal is to place them so that the sides match up with those adjacent as much as possible -- fields to fields, villages to villages, forests to forests, etc. -- to earn as high of a score as you can. Rivers and railway tracks will pose logistical issues, as you will have to build around them. You will occasionally get pieces with goals, such as 'make a village with this number of houses in it', which can add some more complexity to your placement; further, some of these goals will reward you for 'enclosing' the area, meaning to surround it such that you can't add any more pieces to it. Completing these tasks will reward you with more pieces, and keep your game going. Once you run out of tiles, it's game over.

The presentation is calming, with gentle music and a painterly, simplistic feel to the graphics. As you place hexes, the map starts to come to life: trains chugging along the railways you've built, boats floating down the rivers, smoke pluming from chimneys in the villages. It all adds to the soothing vibe -- something people enjoyed so much, they clamored for a "creative" mode, which the developers have recently added, so you can make picturesque little hamlets without any rules if you wish.

Honestly, I love this game. It's one of my current go-tos when I'm feeling overwhelmed and just want to play something game-shaped without any stress attached to it. It's a warm blanket with hot cocoa in video game form, and sometimes, that's exactly what you're looking for. I'll probably be popping back in to this one for a while to come.