Base price: $40.
1 – 6 players.
Play time: 30 – 60 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 11
Full disclosure: A review copy of Dorfromantik was provided by Pegasus Spiele.
New year, new games! I probably need to hit the pacing a bit better since I’m planning on traveling a bunch in the first six months of the year, but that’s a different problem for a different Eric and a different time, I guess. In the now, I have a couple games I’ve been looking forward to talking about for a bit, the first of which is Dorfromantik! Great game to inflict on your family over the holidays whether they like games or not. Either way, let’s hop to it!
In Dorfromantik, your goal is to make the ideal sleepy environment. Build some towns, lay down a forest, maybe see a sheep or two. Who knows! The world is your oyster. If you’re doing well, then you might see the game start increasing in complexity, unlocking new ways to build a town or a river or a very fancy wheat field. Cooperate with your friends and keep building! What will you make?
Contents
Setup
Setup depends a bit game-to-game, primarily because of these:
I won’t be going too in-depth on those at this time; you’ll deal with those as you play more and I’m not into spoilers. They’ll be unlocked via your subsequent plays. Set aside the Campaign Sheet, for now, and find a place for your Score Sheet:
Either way, you’ll first wanna shuffle up the Task Tiles:
Then shuffle up the Landscape Tiles, keeping them separate. Remove three of these at random from the game.
Finally, shuffle the Task Tokens:
Set those in stacks, aside, for now. You should be ready to start the game!
Gameplay
Dorfromantik isn’t too tough to play, though its complexity actually tends to increase in subsequent games. More on that later. Your goal? Work with your co-players to create a relaxing landscape and earn points.
That sounds nice, right? Great.
So the first thing is that every turn goes pretty much the same way. If there are fewer than three Task Tokens face-up, you must draw a Task Tile and place a Task Token on it. If there are three Task Tiles, draw a Landscape tile instead. Either way, place the tile! There are no restrictions, generally, with a few exceptions?
- Railroads must connect to railroads and rivers must connect to rivers.
- You must connect a tile to an already-placed tile, unless it’s the first tile.
Other than that, kind of do whatever you feel like. While there’s no restrictions on matching tile edges otherwise, you might find over the course of your campaign that it’s beneficial to do so. For Task Tiles, there are additional restrictions:
- You cannot place a Task Tile such that it’s connected to a group of its specific type larger than the number on the Task Tile.
- You cannot close off an area with a Task Tile if the area has fewer tiles of that type than the Task Tile.
- You can add a Task Tile to an area that already has one, provided there are fewer tiles with that Task Tile’s type in that area.
If placing a tile causes you to create an already that is equal in size to the Task Token’s value, you complete the task! Place the Task Token face-down to the side; it’ll score points later. Note that you cannot exceed the value, so don’t connect two rivers together to try and create a length-7 river when you have a 6 Task Token.
Continue playing until all of the Landscape Tiles (not all of the Task Tiles) are played, and then total your score! Your score is, for your first game:
- The total of all of your completed Task Tokens
- The length of your longest railroad
- The length of your longest river
- The size of each forest, field, and village with a flag in it, provided they’re completely enclosed.
The last one is a bit different; flags appear on a few tiles and allow you to earn bonus points for big areas of forests / fields / villages, but they must be completely closed off (no edges of their type without a tile attached) or you’ll score 0 for that flag. Total up your score and compare it to the Campaign Sheet; that will tell you how many circles to cross off! Your group can decide how to cross off circles, but every time you hit a hex, you unlock that thing! (Hexes don’t count as circles.) Each box has more to explore and adds a bit of complexity, so see how far you can get!
Player Count Differences
Dorfromantik is one of those cooperative games that are effectively played by committee; there’s no hidden information, no player powers, and so technically every game is effectively a single-player game, as any player can see all of the information that goes into a decision and plan for it. Some people don’t like that, and I get it: there’s some vulnerability to quarterbacking and some people just like having fundamentally different abilities than other players. Personally, I’m a fan of the by-committee play, just because having other players to check my math when it’s my turn is a bit comforting, in a way? They often catch stuff I miss. It can be a bit more group-dependent, though, and even then, I’m not sure that having six players is going to make the overall experience much better than, say, two or three. Four or fewer seems like an ideal number; enough players to communicate with but not so many that you’ll get drowned out in the crowd.
Strategy
- We usually observe the “rule of 3”; we try to make groups of 3, so that we can add a 4 or a 5 Task Tile to that spot and complete it pretty quickly. It’s pretty helpful! If you draw a 4, you can immediately complete it by adding it to one of your groups of 3. Similarly, once you get a 5 or a 6, you can add them on to a 4 or 5 (respectively) and complete those too! You can even attach a 5 to a 5 such that eventually placing the fifth tile will complete both of the tasks! I love it when that happens, if you can get sufficiently lucky.
- Try to group your tile types together so that you can eventually combine big groups together for longest railroad or river, or big flag areas. This is the real trick; you build a bunch of three-tile groups and then eventually connect them. Once you’ve completed all the tasks, you combine them with a flag and score even more points! It’s a good system.
- Keep in mind the long-term; try to avoid building setups that require a very specific tile to work. This is good advice for Carcassonne too, but generally, you don’t want to place a set of tiles such that you need one very specific tile to make everything useful. You never know if that tile is even still in play or if you’ve already used it or it’s out of the game. Either way, bad luck can really mess you up.
- I generally try to face rivers and railroads away from other Tasks so that they don’t interfere. It’s one of those things where since it’s harder to extend those lines, you can end up in a situation where you don’t necessarily have the tiles you need to keep extending them. As a result, I tend to send the rivers and railroads away from where I don’t want them to be.
- Track how many Landscape tiles you have left; you’ll need to be careful if you want to close off all of your flags. You just want to make sure that you’ve closed off all of the flags before the end of the game. One key issue is that if you get the wrong railroad or river in your last round, well, you end up not being able to close off a flag. That’s not particularly ideal, either. You miss out on a ton of points!
- Sometimes the tiles that you want get left out of the game! Don’t plan to see everything every time. Sometimes it’s even a couple of the flags, which is immensely frustrating! There’s not much to be done, but that’s random chance, sometimes. Maybe you’ll figure out another way to get flags in the future?
- It’s also worth keeping track of which Task Tokens you’ve completed, so you know what to expect and when you can extend certain areas (and when you shouldn’t!). The task tokens aren’t entirely unique, but there are only a few of each type, so keep track of what you’ve taken and what you’ve completed; this might mean that you can predict what you’re going to draw next.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Just a very relaxing game. It’s very much a play tiles almost wherever you want and however you want and we’ll give you some points at the end of the game.
- I appreciate that the game is very drop-in / drop-out; any player can leave at any point or even skip games in the campaign if they want. If you decide you’re sick of the game on your turn, you can literally just pass the tile you drew to the next player and then go do your own thing. There’s no real continuity between players required for the game; you can just bounce.
- Pleasant art. It’s very reminiscent of the video game, and I like that a lot. Pleasant without being too busy and the landscape you create by the end of the game is solid.
- A nice insert helps keep everything organized! I’ve been dealing with so many games without inserts lately that it’s nice to have one where all the tiles and boxes and such fit pretty well with no fuss. Definitely a relief.
- There’s a lot of emergent strategy that you’ll figure out over several games. You’re not necessarily going to figure it out in your first game, and that’s okay! As you play you’re going to start seeing patterns and ways to do things that will make the game more interesting and entertaining, which is also a lot of fun. My strategies work just fine for me but you might find an even better way to play! Just have fun and explore.
- There’s also no real penalty for having a bad game! You don’t really win or lose; you just advance in the campaign more slowly. That can give you time to focus on certain elements that you missed last time around or to try and learn more strategies for what you’ve unlocked. That’s all good.
- A lot of the campaign content is extremely fun, and the game grows in complexity over subsequent plays. I really like how some of the new tiles that get added change up gameplay elements in a useful and interesting way; I’m looking forward to trying more of them in the future.
- I think this has a very smart campaign design, which elevates the game a lot. This is pretty much the reason I think Dorfromantik won the Spiel, personally. The campaign design builds off of what I was saying earlier about a bad game not penalizing you; it just slows down your pace of unlocking things. That means that if you’re consistently playing well, the game is increasing in scope and complexity more quickly, and if you’re consistently having lower-scoring games, the pace of the campaign slows to match. It makes the campaign feel very reactive to your engagement, which is pretty brilliant, especially since it does so without inflicting penalties on the players. This makes Dorfromantik a chill campaign game that can be played with just about anyone; the players set their pace and the game responds.
Mehs
- Having “higher-value” tiles (like the flags, mostly) getting removed from the game during the initial shuffle doesn’t feel amazing. That’s just how it works, sometimes, though it’s fairly unlikely that it will happen. Doesn’t make that feel better when it does; it’s just unlikely.
- This is more humorous than a complaint, but while I appreciate that the game can be reverted to its base state, it’s a bit of a pain to have to do it at conventions where you need to revert it after every game. You’re really only supposed to need to do it to change campaigns, but given that we were playing it at BGG.CON, it felt rude to just have all the campaign unlockables out in the open for everyone, so we had to routinely put them all away between sessions. If you’re doing that, try to play two or three games per session so that it at least feels worth it.
Cons
- Just organizationally, there are some real quality-of-life improvements that would make the game easier to set and reset game-to-game. The big one would be putting the box number on the front of the tile; we had a number of games where we weren’t sure which tile went in which box when we were resetting, Similarly, indicating Special Tiles with a little star on the front or something would be pretty nice. Carcassonne does this with a little expansion symbol on the front of every tile and while they’re a little missable, they do help.
Overall: 8.75 / 10
Overall, I think Dorfromantik is a blast! One of the better games I’ve played in 2023, since I’ve had time to reflect on it. There are definitely some who feel like they’d rather play the video game version, and while I completely get the sentiment, I think the two games are distinct enough that there’s room for both in my life. My trouble with the video game version is that the procedural generation of things makes for like, 1300+ tree forests, which ends up being stressful and hard to track at some point. Here, everything is based on tiles and kept to fairly low numbers that I can track, which is great. It makes the scope of the game feel less expansive (and honestly that’s a bit better). The campaign element are also impeccably designed, and I talked a bit about that earlier in the review but I feel like there’s an element of pacing that allows the game to grow with you as you get better and learn strategies. You may not unlock something after every game, and that’s totally fine! That’s the game telling you to focus on what you already have and try for an even better score so that the complexity of the game never spirals out of control. Is it a tiny bit prescriptive? Probably, but I appreciate the rails nonetheless. This ends up being a very relaxed campaign game that I play with my friends on a very regular basis, and I’m looking forward to my next game. I do wonder how many fans of the video game will get drawn in? Only time will tell. Either way, though, if you’re looking for a chill board game for casual play, you want a game whose complexity will increase over time, or you just want to build a pleasant little village, I’d highly recommend Dorfromantik! I liked it a lot.
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