When I was a bit younger, I was an active member of a boardgaming club. It was a great hobby, and I would gladly get back to it, but alas, the group I was with shed members with time until nothing but excuses remained. There are plenty of great boardgame bars, however, in my home town, so I hold hope that with some vim and effort, I’ll be able to scrounge back those fun evenings. In the meantime, however, the world of video games can fill in the void, as the genre of card and board games is having a long-lasting renaissance that keeps on giving. But not every game has to be a brainy affair like Agricola or high-stakes play to outwit your opponents like Twilight Struggle. Some games should give you a way to unwind, relax, sip your favorite tea, and listen to gentle tunes as your mind is gently led by the soft focus of simple yet engaging tasks.
That is, basically, the totality of Dorfromantik. “The Lover of Villages” as you can very roughly translate the title, is a pretty well-known tile placement game where you slowly but steadily expand and construct a charming world of rustic villages, forests, fields of wheat, meandering rivers, and railroads. It is a very pleasant, soothing experience to its core, but that does not mean that it is not a full-fledged game in its own rights. There are rules, and while they are simple, they will definitely lead you to a game over screen more often than you might be willing to admit!
The systems are very rudimentary and connected to a simple, intuitive mechanic — the placement of the tiles matters, a lot. Each hex edge contains one of the ‘flavours’ of the landscape: the aforementioned villages, fields, forests, plains, rivers, etc. To gain new tiles, you need to complete quests and make perfect placements by making sure that tiles are surrounded by other tiles with their respective types to form cohesive, aesthetically pleasing, and sensible pieces of landscape. Quests, at the same time, demand that you either form new clusters or close old, big ones off. Each completion of a quest awards points and new tiles to work with and weave within your landscape.
This simple core of the gameplay is pretty deceptive and might even, perish the thought, lead to a bit of minor frustration when the game, in its sparks of mischief, offers you a real stinker of a tile to work with (like those accursed railroad crossways with multiple knots of rails—you might learn to find a solid kernel of burning dislike for these in time). But even then, it is never a dealbreaker, for there are no boundaries to your growing, hexagonal realm, and you can gently ‘banish’ the unloved tile to some obscure corner to linger, disconnected and unloved, forever. Or until a fitting tile finally appears, later down the line.
All of that might sound like the game can maybe maintain itself for a couple of hours of good, relaxing fun, but then... what? What remains?
Fortunately, the game has a few great little hooks to keep you engaged. Every now and then you’ll see a new, unfamiliar tile in the distance, to which you must strive to connect in order to earn them, but there is also a pretty hefty collection of challenges that display in the game corner, which reward you with new tiles and biomes as you keep completing them—many of these being simple enough but requiring multiple sessions, making sure you have a neat little reason to come back to make a new landscape over and over again.
The whole experience can be summed up by this simple word: serene. It’s a soothing balm on the mind and soul. Sure, you might scoff a bit at the idea that a pretty simple video game could garner such a description, but it just works. After a stressful day at work, just half an hour in Dorfromantik can be almost as good as a serious sit-down for meditation. It lets you decompress without feeling the tedium of boredom or the fidgeting of idleness.
The beauty of Dorfromantik lies in its impeccable balance of engaging gameplay that keeps you softly focused on what’s going on and how to place your tiles with some mindfulness. That beautifully relaxing atmosphere, aided greatly by a fantastic soundtrack and soft, gentle visual style that is just so very pleasant to lay your gaze upon. It is hard not to feel a little bit more at peace after a solid session with this game, and for me, that is the highest praise any relaxing game can get.
And therefore, I can only strongly recommend this title, which has already made a little revival of the tile placement games, which are now popping up from the fertile soil of indie games like mushrooms in autumn.
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