I don’t mind admitting it; this little write-up would have been published much sooner if I hadn’t made the silly mistake of firing up Dorfromantik first to give my brain a bit of a refresher. And, honestly, I should have known better. This gem from Toukana Interactive is easily one of my favourite – and I might even go as far as to suggest best – strategic puzzlers from the last five years. It’s also one of the most soothingly, hypnotically compelling, so as I prepare to alert you to its new arrival on Xbox and PlayStation, consider yourself warned.
The fundamentals of Dorfromantik are easy enough to explain: you’ve a stack of hex-shaped tiles and your goal is to place each one on the board by matching like-for-like edges. The more edges you match, the more points you get, and if you somehow manage to find yourself in a position where you can’t place a tile, it’s game over. There’s a little more to it than that, of course. Some tiles contain little placement challenges, for instance, so you can grab more points by, say, connecting a specific number of matching tiles over time, as long as you don’t inadvertently cause two connected challenges to cancel each other out. But it’s essentially a game of short-term forward planning, so you’re always maximising the potential of every upcoming tile. And, yes, that is absolutely the most boring way to describe Dorfromantik.
You see, the bit I’ve so far neglected to mention is exactly what you’ll be placing. This is a game of gorgeous bucolic sprawl, new tiles revealing tiny copses that slowly expand into sweeping picturesque forests as play goes on; isolated houses that bloom into quaint villages into bustling hubs of smoke belching chimneys; train tracks that loop around lakes that split into long, lazy rivers, sail boats and canal boats chugging endlessly back and forth along their crystal blue waters. From simple tiles grow vast and serene dioramas that, inch-by-inch, piece-by-piece, begin to feel beautifully, organically alive.
And that’s probably Dorfromantik’s cleverest trick. To me at least, it never feels like a game that’s just about placing tiles. It’s a game of slowly blossoming worlds, of wrestling form and beauty and order from the chaos of those random stacks. I am, I should note, absolutely terrible at Dorfromantik, and I’ll readily admit that’s entirely down to the way I play. I’ll endlessly, compulsively ignore an easy win in search of the aesthetic ideal, skipping out on points just so my towns can back onto forest looking out over vast lakes where looping strands of water intertwine to form evocatively lonely islands. And given Dorfromanik also has a creative mode so you can really get stuck in and beautify those landscapes with unlockable pieces and exotic new colour palettes once a game has reached its conclusion, I suspect I’m not alone.
But even if your interests don’t particularly extend to obsessive tinkering in search of pastoral perfection, Dorfromantik is still pretty sublime. It’s loose enough to invite all sorts of satisfying strategic opportunities as turns continue, but focused enough that games are brisk and eminently accessible. It’s wonderful stuff – and with its soundscape of endless bird song and slow ebb of soothing synths, wonderfully relaxing – so consider this a wholehearted recommendation to check it out on Xbox and PlayStation (or the older PC and Switch releases) if it even remotely sounds like your sort of thing. But if you suddenly find your hours mysteriously disappearing amid visions of endless pastel-hued pastures, don’t say I didn’t warn you.