One More Go

If the long cold winter nights has you seeking something cosy, then Dorfromantik might be the game for you. Inspired by tile placement games such as Carcassonne, Dorfromantik has you crafting idyllic landscapes one hexagon at a time. Each tile edge features a biome, a grassy plain, housing, farmland, etc. but the configuration in which they appear makes every placement a puzzle. There are few limits on where you can place a piece, flowing water or railway networks are the only tiles that need a direct match, everything else can be placed along any edge. However, perfect placements, when every edge of a hexagon matches to the correct biome, will grant you an extra tile to place, stretching out the game a little longer.

There are also quests to consider, placing farmland might come with the requirement of creating a network that contains at least or an exact number of fields. Each completed quest will nab you an extra five turns, and there’s a chance that you’ll unlock an additional objective (a flag quest) to close off your open network, bagging you even more turns. You can only see the next three tiles to be placed, making it difficult to plan. Closing a large network will grant you tiles now, but it puts you at risk of not being able to fulfil future quests, eating into your total number of turns and dragging you closer towards the end of the game. Dorfromantik becomes a balance between expanding and closing your biomes, trying to work out whether you hold out for the perfect tile, or do you settle for something that’s “good enough”, close out a few quests and extend the game.

Eventually the dwindling number of turns will have you scouring your expanded geography for the perfect place to drop a tile, searching for that one gap that will grant you a few extra turns. When you do finally run out of tiles you can continue on in Creative Mode, where you have much more control over the pieces that are placed, plugging any gaps and finishing off the world that has otherwise been grown organically.

Dorfromantik has a series of challenges that you unlock effortlessly through play. Placing tiles of a certain type, or building a network of a certain size will eventually unlock cosmetic rewards. Frozen rivers, beaver lodges, or Sakura groves are eventually peppered throughout the map, and while you get the expected dopamine hit as the game rings out a perfect tile placement, the real satisfaction is when you zoom out and see the landscape you’ve created. Trains and boats chugging along tracks and rivers interwoven into your patchwork landscape. In that sense Dorfromantik is arguably more of a crafting experience than a video game. Perfect for when you need to decompress or escape the busy winter weekends.