Dorfromantik review: a blissful, minimalist chill-out game

The German word “dorfromantik” can be literally translated as “village romanticization.” Its real meaning is more ineffable. Eurogamer interviewed the developers and designers of Dorfromantik in an interview. Dorfromantik (the game) said the word was “usually used to describe the kind of nostalgic feeling you get when you long to be in the countryside.” Dorfromantik is a state of mind.

That couldn’t be more apt for this exquisite chill-out game, which has just emerged from a year of early access. Dorfromantik This peaceful, tranquil game of tile placement is like a minimalist meditation. Catan. Hexagonal tiles are used to build landscapes, including patchwork fields, pine forests and meandering streams. You also create red-brick villages with tiny red-brick communities. (No roads, though.) And that’s it. There’s no resource production or cost to think about — no competition, no population, no politics, no win, no lose. Your tiles’ alignment is all that matters. You are purely interested in harmony and beauty.

Playing DorfromantikThis is a relaxing experience. It can even be described as aesthetically cleansing. It is a beautiful and playful way to express your imagination. It’s just a nice place to be. Time doesn’t pass here, and nobody needs anything from you. There is no need to count down as you think about placing the next tile. Take as much time as you want. You can play this game as easily in 5 minutes or less between work sprints than it is over three hours of blissful, zoned-in time.

Image: Toukana Interactive

This is all to say that DorfromantikHowever, it is not a goalless or non-existent. In fact, it’s quite tightly shaped and controlled. Developer Toukana — a group of four game design students from Berlin — blends elements of strategy and puzzle games, as well as solitaire-style games of chance, within a simple, finely judged design.

The tiles you place are dealt from a randomized stack that’s always dwindling. You can earn more tiles through quests to help you keep your game moving, grow your landscape, and increase your score. When you place certain tiles, these quests ask you to combine ever more of the five elements of the landscape: hundreds of houses and thousands of trees, dozens of water tiles and hundreds of tiles. You might be asked to connect one tile to 36 others, or to collect exactly 13 houses. On completion, some quests raise a flag that rewards you with even more tiles if you successfully close out the town or forest or waterway by surrounding it with other landscape elements so it can’t be expanded any further.

This beautifully simple rule set has ramifications — and to Toukana’s immense credit, those ramifications operate aesthetically as well as in the realm of game balance. DorfromantikEncourages strategy and care, but discourages optimization. You can’t succeed in this game by building a sprawling metropolis in one corner of the map, a huge forest in another, and a giant farming prairie in a third. You will be surprised at the unexpected additions to your landscapes as you complete every quest. The system is very simple, yet logical. It’s designed to create unexpected organic outcomes. That’s an incredible achievement.

Image: Toukana Interactive

Initial challenges are the river and rail tiles. These can’t be placed near other types or close to terminal points. These can easily create blockages to the expansion of your map as you wait for the “ideal” tile to turn up in the stack. Unsightly knots and gaps appear, in place of the steady, even flowering that you’re instinctively looking for. Rivers and trains can bring a bit of frustration. Dorfromantik’s calm and satisfying mental tune — but the game would probably be TooIt is easygoing to do without them.

My first couple of games with Dorfromantik, the more I learned about the game’s design and tried to engage with it, the worse I would do. My scores kept going down; my stack kept running dry. Was there something else going on? My attempt to cheat the system was futile. I was lumping too many quests together — four or five forest quests in a single body of trees — aiming for efficiency, but in doing so, breaking the game’s steady rhythm. This isn’t a game about ambition. For a brain that is accustomed to video game rewards systems, it can be difficult for the mind to stop the cycle of escalation and move at a slower pace.

I finally slowed down. I tended to pay less attention to the quests and more on tile-matching. Matching the edges of tiles earns you points: house to house and tree to tree. Grass to grass is another way to score points. For 60 points, you get an additional tile and a perfect match on all six edges. You will be happier. When harmony was the goal instead of efficiency, it became my reality. Dorfromantik I met you halfway. My scores were higher, my runs more intense, and my maps more stunning.

Image: Toukana Interactive

The 1.0 update adds one of the best and most subtle changes to this play mode. This highlights matches more clearly, and makes perfect placements pop. Elsewhere, there are new music tracks, all belonging to the genre “extremely tasteful ambient that sounds OK with cows mooing over it.” You can now track more of the meta-goals that reward you with new tile types and cosmetic customizations, including the lovely seasonal “biomes.” And there are several new ways to play, alongside the Classic and anything-goes Creative modes that were already present in early access.

One mode, Quick Mode has 75 tiles as a maximum and can take between 10 and 30 minutes to complete. Hard Mode is easier to use and has more tiles. You can play with probabilities, quests and other parameters in Custom Mode. Then you can share your settings and the seeds for the tile stack with other players. Monthly Mode is my favorite. It has a custom seed, and a game set that can be changed monthly. This should make it a great place to have fun with the community, as well as allowing them to compete on the leaderboards.

It is all very welcome. Dorfromantik It will provide a richer and more rewarding gaming experience. This is a game that early access was not a good idea for. It was not lacking features or improvements, it was simply because the premise of this game was fully and perfectly understood from its inception. You could ruin it by adding too much or attempting to disturb the delicate equilibrium between flow and friction, logic and naturalism. The Toukana team is smarter than this. They’re at peace as they stroll through the rural countryside with their heads.

DorfromantikWindows PC version is available now. Toukana Interactive gave us a free download code. Vox Media is an affiliate partner. They do not affect editorial content. However, Vox Media might earn commissions for products bought via affiliate links. Here are some links to help you find. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.