Dorfromantik - A super chill town building puzzle game


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Dorfromantik is a fresh twist on the city builder genre.

I have been stuck on this little gem for about a week now, and I had to share what I found. As described by the developers, Dorfromantik is "a game about building villages and taking a break from the city". I personally describe it as kinda like playing Sim City and Chess at the same time, whilst also piecing together a jigsaw puzzle...

Currently in early access on Steam for just $10, this wonderfully peaceful yet strategically challenging indie game is developed by Toukana Interactive, made up of 4 German game design students!


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Each new game begins with a field of 7 hexagonal cells, the center containing a "blank" grassy clearing tile. The player is then given a stack of 40 tiles to place in any valid empty cell they so choose. The game ends when the player runs out of tiles to place on the board.


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Tiles can only be placed adjacent to another, and ideally, the player will want to place the tiles they're given so that each of its six edges touches a similar edge of another tile. Tiles can contain houses, trees, fields, grass, water, or railroads.

The latter two act slightly different than the rest, being "transportation avenues", and must connect to each other. (You can't place a field or forest at the end of a river. The water must continue to flow somewhere.) There are, however, "end tiles" for both waterways and railroads that can help you deal with this challenge.

Every now and again you'll get a tile with a number on it like the blue "2+" on the river tile at the top of my stack here.


These are Quest Tiles, and fulfilling the objective displayed will grant the player more tiles to expand their landscape even further and prolonging the game. There are quests for each of the different areas like forests, towns, and water. The quests displayed in the image below simply require me to link 3 more houses, 5 more trees, etc, to the tile by connecting similar edges from other tiles.

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Houses, fields and forests can contain multiples within a single tile, while it's quite rare to find a single tile with multiple waterways or rails, as they don't "fit" well together on a single six-edged tile, though it can occur, and you'll even find tiles with both a waterway and a rail that can throw a wrench in how you planned to lead a particular railroad or river...


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Beyond the quests that come from placing tiles, there are also long term "challenges" that will test your ability to do various things like consistently connecting edges "correctly" in a single game, or finishing a number of games above a target score. These challenges can give the player a sense of progression over multiple games and play sessions.

Not all of the challenges are unlocked when one first starts playing, though. Many of the challenges must be "found" by expanding the landscape reaching out to special cells that contain a long term quest like the others.


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I did finally break 10,000 points in a game shortly after I took the screenshot above, but not by much. I'm having SO much fun playing Dorfromantik, and I can't wait to see where Toukana Interactive takes this beautifully put together game that forces the player to think both on a micro and macro level at the same time.

Thank you so much for reading!

Have you played Dorfromantik? Does my "review" make you want to check it out? Comment below and let me know what you think!

If you enjoyed this post, consider looking into my other content on Hive, or visit SirSweeney.com to learn more about the work I do and the things I promote.

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