Dorfromantik have announced a new version of their hit board game. Coming in October, it’ll give us the chance to set sail to the gorgeous South Seas!
For anybody unfamiliar, Dorfromantik is a cosy tile-based “puzzle” game produced by Toukana Interactive that plays in a similar vein to Catan. Starting out as an early access video game in the beginning of 2021, the experience proved popular enough (and won plenty of awards) for the team over at Pegasus Spiele to produce a physical board game version. Fast forward a few years and now there’s various physical versions with a variety of themes (and support for digital game too with Medieval Biomes).
We took a look at the digital version while it was back in early access, which is slightly more expansive than the physical versions, and declared that it was “a game to be enjoyed in bite-size pieces. Twenty minutes here, half an hour there. A chance to escape into your own little world for a short period of time and let your mind relax a bit.”
Dorfromantik — Mindfulness and strategy collide in a peaceful building game
Starting with a single tile, you work down a procedurally generated stack of tiles to place. Each tile has pieces of various types of biome on them, and by rotating and joining tiles, you create larger and larger groupings of these areas. Certain tiles will feature challenges, asking you to have a certain number of tiles featuring an environment (like a field of wheat) in a single grouping, or scoring points for closing off an area of environment and ticking off a large amount of tiles within. All of this combines with classic challenges like longest road and river to give you a variety of things to juggle as your playing area grows larger and larger.
From personal experience with the physical version (the Sakura variant to be specific, with its beautiful cherry blossom palette), I can confirm that the board game can take around 45-90 minutes to play, and is an absolute joy to behold. Engaging enough to pass the time, but not stressful enough to cause arguments and headaches as a co-operative experience. With it being physical, you cannot have an infinite set of tiles, but instead you draw from objective or environment tiles, making sure you always have three objectives at any given time, and then counting up your score at the end (and if you like, recording it on the campaign notebook and “unlocking” more components and mechanics).
Other physical variants include The Duel (turning the typically co-op game into a light and friendly competition), The Board Game (the original adaption of the videogame), Light Luggage (a travel edition for smaller tables and big adventures) and the aforementioned Sakura.
Dorfromantik: South Seas will hopefully be visible at SPIEL ESSEN, the huge public board game fair in Messe Essen, Germany, for all those looking to set sights on the gorgeous new visuals, and you should be able to pick up any of the other physical versions at wherever you grab your board games.
The original video game is also out of early access (and has been for a few years now), and is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.