DORFROMANTIK
Around 25 years ago, I visited my cousin in Germany, near Dusseldorf. She was working with the military, didn’t have a lot of spare time and (for the most part) left me to my own devices. I recall wandering down rambling rivers, through forests, and drinking warm gluhweine at brightly coloured pubs. Dorfromantik reconstructs this experience for me, piece by piece. It’s incredibly relaxing, like my holiday, but also intensely stressful. I want to explore each lovely village forever, but the stack of tiles has to be perfectly managed at all times, or everything comes to an abrupt end.
My first impression, from screenshots, was that this might be similar to Townscaper, like an interactive artwork, based on beautiful, algorithmic chaos. Dorfromantik is much more of a “game”. Each (seemingly) random tile must be played in order and has any combination of elements, including trees, houses, fields, grass, railway and water, on each of six edges. Matching similar edges boosts points and creates chains of elements for the purpose of fulfilling “quests”, like creating a village with exactly 15 houses, or a forest with 500+ trees.
First, I simply learned how to create chains of adjacent forests, fields and villages. Then I learned to place quest tiles in order, from lowest to highest, allowing each chain to grow. The rewards are (usually) the additional tiles necessary to keep playing. Soon enough, forest quests were as mighty as to require thousands of trees but, if the forest chain already had 900 trees in it, it was achievable. Some quests create flags, which are a kind of quest to seal a chain. I’ve found that waiting until I have 4 or 5 flags in a chain can be extremely
rewarding.
It’s certainly possible to play with aesthetic goals in mind, but your town will end up small. As soon as your stack of tiles gets below whatever threshold you can tolerate (mine is 25), you need to work (single mindedly) towards completing quests. Or, you can aim for goals, some of which persist across games and may be unlocked by building out to “special” tiles. I built the ugliest, most ridiculous forest corridor just to unlock a special forest tile (I hardly ever roll) with a deer on it. Totally worth it. Doesn’t sound worth it? It was. I can’t even articulate why.
Indeed, this game is nebulously compelling. I’ve played it for hours. My highest score is only around 15,000 but I have absolutely pored over screenshots of higher scoring efforts, the largest I’ve seen scoring 72,480. There’s a lot of luck involved, but you can manipulate just enough to genuinely control the game, for a time. It’s perfect as it is, but I also can’t stop thinking of what I’d add. A punishing undo button, the ability to collect a bank of “out of sequence” cards, post game turns where you can just fill in the holes and nothing more.
I was playing a village while writing this review, trying to think of the best way to summarise Dorfromantik. To my horror, I noticed I had only six tiles left and a disappointing 6350 points. I was completely lost in the flow of the experience, a mere 55 houses away from unlocking a tiny fountain. The game is now finished, but I briefly fought myself from three tiles to 35, thanks to four interlocking, and carefully planned, fields quests and two flags. I did not get my fountain. It’s this combination of excitement and exquisite frustration that will keep me coming back for more.