Imagine you’re in charge of the spatial planning of a picturesque village in a nondescript region. You have your villages to go with your lush forests, rolling plains, and babbling brooks. Even the train tracks – the footsteps of humming steam engines – don’t feel half as invasive as you thought they would. Build your settlement – your dorf – one hexagonal tile at a time.
Name: Dorfromantik (2022)
Designer: Michael Palm, Lukas Zach
Publisher: Pegasus Spiele
Play type: map addition, tile placement, territory building, campaign game
What the game is about
Can you make a thriving village with lush forests, thriving meadows, luscious rivers, and endless railways? Dorfromantik is a tile-laying game where you try to complete mini-objectives in order to score as high as possible, progressing you through its campaign to unlock goodies for future games.
How the game works
Dorfromantik is a strategic tile-laying game where you try to match pattern types to fulfill goals on objective tiles. When the game starts, you reveal task tiles until there are three in play. Whenever you draw one of those, you put on a matching task token – village, forest, grain, river, or rails – with a number on it. As soon as you complete a task (i.e. have a connecting network of exactly X of the specified terrain types), you draw new ones until there are exactly three active tasks again.
Every tile you place can be placed anywhere in any orientation; however, rails and rivers cannot be blocked off with another terrain type as they must be matched. For the tasks, there is no incentive to continue once a task is completed (although you could chain a 4 into a 5, for example). However, each ‘basic’ terrain type – forest, village, grain – also has a territory marker that scores for each connected tile, provided the area is fully enclosed. That means no open spots at the edges. At the end of the game, you score points for all completed task tokens, as well as each enclosed territory.
Dorfromantik is a campaign game (although you can play without it). After every game, your score allows you to cross off a certain number of boxes on a campaign sheet. You can chase after certain goals that allow you to open certain boxes once their threshold is met. Unlocks can include extra tiles, task tiles, task tokens, or new ways to score points. Later on, you can also gain achievements that can only be unlocked if you devote your specific attention to them.
Theme, setting & narrative
Other than building a lush settlement with its rivers and trains and valleys, Dorfromantik is pretty devoid of theme. The game looks good, but that doesn’t mean it sucks you in on that front. Its biggest strength is clearly its zen-like presentation and relaxing gameplay (at least at the beginning; more on that later). You don’t feel like you are an architect or a spatial planner, and you never will. It’s not the intent behind this game and its looks; the goal is to look pretty on the table, at which it succeeds, and to provide enticing gameplay. Cue…
How does it play?
While comparisons to other games (and one in particular) are inevitable, it feels unfair to immediately gauge Dorfromantik in terms of other games instead of as its own entity. So what is Dorfromantik? It is a very chill and laid-back tile-laying game where you are basically just matching tiles to create patterns that score points. You need a forest of exactly five tiles, so that’s what you’re gonna build if the right tiles come out.
Quickly, though, you start seeing the patterns. Like how you can complete a 4-forest and keep it open to later fulfill a 5-forest. Or how you complete two matching task tiles separately, only to later connect them into one large territory for more end-game points. The game is relaxing to not make you feel like you’re starting out as a complete noob (even the worst possible score still lets you tick a box), but soon enough you can look ahead, form a strategy, and make tactical decisions to help execute it. The game subtly shifts from a tactical one into a strategic one without you even noticing it, and that feels really good. As the game progresses, and you’re advancing on the campaign sheet, the challenge does ramp up, as the goals you need to achieve increase in difficulty. But that’s okay, because by then, you should be up for that.
The game has a smart build-up for that, which makes you feel smart. As said before, the more you play, the more you start seeing interactions and clever tile placement to benefit from, and reap maximum rewards. As you play the game, you get to tick off more and more boxes, which give you new rewards that generally help you increase your score. The beauty of this is that your scores increase overall, whether by skill, more scoring opportunities, or, optimally – both.
So let’s get to the first game that comes to mind when I see Dorfromantik on the table, and that is Cascadia. I can see why; they have similar vibrant art styles, are easy to learn, relaxing to play (mostly), and open up new layers of strategy as you play more of it. But there are differences. While both can be played in a vacuum, Dorfromantik offers players a campaign while Cascadia has solo challenges. Dorfromantik sticks purely to matching terrain to score points, whereas Cascadia focuses on tile and animal patterns. While Dorfromantik certainly is challenging, especially later on, I think Cascadia offers more of a challenge when you dive into the solo scenarios. The challenge in Dorfromantik comes more from trying to go for goals you are setting for yourself, like scoring an X amount of points to reach a certain threshold on the campaign tracker, of going for a certain achievement card. What is better? That is subjective, and entirely up to your preferences.
The campaign is an interesting kind of beast; it is not something where you play scenarios, or when you know at the end of a game whether you get something new or not. Yet, it is not really beat-your-own-score either. It ditches a rigid structure with clear rewards in favour of a system where you as the player have more agency in making your choices. Does it make the game more open, or does it go too far and does it lose guidance in the process? That is not really a question for me to answer, but rather one you need to figure out for yourself as you play.
I suppose I can’t end the review portion of this article without actually telling you want I think of the way Dorfromantik presents its challenge, lest I want this to be a glorified rules overview (which neither of us wants). What I like is the free-roaming aspect, that thing where you can just sit down and go ‘right, how about I try to score 30 points with rail objectives this game?’. Sure, sometimes the tiles don’t fall the right way for that, but after almost 20 plays, I know this system is less random than it looks. You can finesse it to work your way, sort of like you’re laying the foundations of your own luck. Were you lucky you drew the right tile, or did you do the necessary prep work to finagle the odds in your favour?
What I liked less was that, especially towards the later end of the campaign, was that the time between unlocks grew longer, and that more and more games ended in ‘no result’ (except for ticking a few boxes based on your score). Games started to blend together, and I was losing interest so I shelved the game for a while.
I hate to keep bringing up Cascadia, but at least there, every solo scenario you play has a clear challenge laid out for you – as I said, this is just my two cents, and your mileage may vary, but I feel the game is interesting enough to at least warrant a try to see if it works for you. It does for me; with caution, that is.
What you might like
- Quick to set up, relaxing, and fast to play
- Both strategic and tactical, but it’s up to you how much of each (without punishing you for either)
- The game slowly increases your score as you progress toward different goals, which makes you feel really good
- The campaign is hardly noticeable, which means you can just keep playing games, ticking boxes, and slowly expanding your experience
- Because there are so many things you can do, the game doesn’t shoehorn you into doing certain things – you are your own master and can do whatever you want, at your own leisure
What you might not like
- Games tend to get a bit repetitive as you get further into the campaign and the time between unlocks generally increases
Conclusion
Dorfromantik is a game of many rewards, most ready for you to pursue at your leisure. Where especially later on in the game things could get repetitive, the early plays are a joy of continuing unlocks as you progress through the game and master the intricacies of the system. Because its system is so freeform it’s hard to recommend it (because in this case, beauty is in the eye of the beholder), but I’d go so far as to say that you’re missing out if you don’t at least give it a try.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
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Stidjen Plays Solo 