Board Game Review: DORFROMANTIK

DORFROMANTIK is a city building themed, puzzle game. Fans of board games and city building sims will be absolutely in their element here. Potentially one of the most peaceful games ever to be made and also, one of the least stressful games I have played too.

The aim is to place hexagonal tiles in such a way that you build towns, rivers, railways, forests and farming fields. Every time a piece matches something it is placed next to, you score points. That is essentially the game, along with it's sheer simplicity.

At first look, it might appear that there is no real challenge to this game but that is not true in the slightest. Sure you can piece together fields and houses to make big towns but it's the small challenge pieces that really make the difference to your score and play time in this game.

You start with a limited number of tiles to place but in order to earn more tiles (increasing your playtime and score) you must complete challenges from certain drawn out tiles. This might be a challenge where you must place 300+ trees next to each other or the slightly harder challenges which asks you to place exactly the right number of houses next to each other (for example). This can get quite tricky if you haven't been too careful with early tile placements.

Each geographical feature has different levels of difficulty, some of which restrict where you can place certain tiles. The forests, farm fields and houses are quite easily placed meaning they can go pretty much anywhere. Rivers are harder as they (obviously) need to be attached to another river tile. The water spaces can be closed off quite easily though as the tiles will slightly adjust themselves to show that it's the edge of the water. The trickiest to place are the railway tiles, these are not moveable and always need to follow of from a railway space (with the exception of the water stations). Finding an "end piece" to a railway track is glorious knowing that you don't have to worry about continuing the track anymore.

Eventually, you will run out of tiles and the game is up, giving you your total score. The option then is to start again, trying to beat your previous score, or make your way further up the global leader board. There are also various things to unlock too, like new pieces of scenery, different buildings, wild animals and different biomes. These definitely make the game worth playing over and over.

I bought this game when it first came out and was pleased with it as a nice little puzzler but as time went on, I realised there is more and more depth to what you can do with the game and now I am back hooked on it again.

What's more, this game has now been released as a co-operative board game as well, picking up various awards. I have yet to land my hands on a copy of the board game but I am very much looking forward to playing it and seeing how it compares to playing this version of it.

Any puzzler, board game and sim fans will be pleased with this and I hope you find the same sort of peace and enjoyment as I have from it too. Thoroughly recommend.