Dorfromantik (The Board Game)
Dorfromantik: The Board Game is a cooperative tile-laying game designed by Michael Palm and Lukas Zach, and published by Pegasus Spiele in 2022. It comes from the video game with the same name by Toukana Interactive. It’s for 1–6 players, and I’d say it’s mostly for families or people who want a low-key, no-pressure game night. The big thing about it is that everyone works together , there’s no competition at all, which honestly ended up being one of my problems with it.
I think Dorfromantik has a really appealing look and a simple idea at its core, but the confusing scoring system and the fully cooperative setup made it feel frustrating and kind of boring after a few rounds. And when I think about it through a world-building lens, the game puts all its effort into building a nice-looking landscape but gives you nothing, no characters, no story, no conflict, to actually care about inside that world. As Gabriela Pereira puts it in “The Psychology of World Building,” “world building has less to do with your story’s environment and more to do with the characters you put in it.” You have to build around your characters and think about your setting from an ecological perspective, and Dorfromantik basically doesn’t do that at all.
Sketchnote of The Psychology of World Building by Gabriela Pereira
The mechanics feel simple at first, then they just don’t.
So when you start playing, it seems really easy. You pull a tile, it’s got some trees or houses or a river on it, and you place it next to other tiles trying to match the edges. Easy, anyone can do that. But then you realize the scoring is way more complicated than it should be. There are quests tied to specific tile clusters, a point threshold system for unlocking new content, and this whole campaign progression chart thing. My group spent half the time just reading the rules and arguing about how the scoring worked instead of actually playing. It felt like the game was fighting against itself , the tiles on the table look so calm and pretty, but the rules behind them are a mess. There’s no character, no story, nothing personal pulling you into the world. When the mechanics are smooth, you can kind of get into it anyway just through the tiles , they become your window into the world. But the moment the rules get confusing, that window closes. You stop seeing the cute village and start seeing a math problem, for me personally, I also start losing my patient. I think if the designers had kept the scoring simpler, the game would have stayed true to what it looks like: something easy and relaxing. Instead, there’s this weird gap between how the game presents itself and how it actually plays.
Working together sounds fun until it’s not.
My other issue is that there’s literally zero competition. Everyone shares one score. You win together or you don’t. That matches the whole peaceful countryside vibe the game is going for, but it also means there’s nothing pushing you to play another round. Pereira’s article also brings up how supporting characters in a story either keep things stable or shake things up with conflict. Dorfromantik has nothing that shakes things up , no rival, no enemy, not even another player trying to beat you. In game Carcassonne, which is also a tile-laying game, you’re always trying to steal territory from each other or block someone’s move, and that’s what makes it fun to replay. Dorfromantik doesn’t give you any of that tension. After like two or three rounds, nobody at our table really wanted to keep going. I feel like if they had added even just individual scores on top of the team score , so you’re cooperating but also kind of competing , it would’ve helped a lot. A world that has absolutely no friction in it is relaxing for maybe twenty minutes, and then you just stop caring.
I appreciate that the game avoids stereotypes and doesn’t put anyone in an uncomfortable position, it’s very inclusive and friendly. But I do think a world with little tension can actually keep people caring about it for more than a few plays and finding more personal meaning during the game.
