The game we played was Dorfromantik, published by Toukana Interactive and available on digital (Nintendo Switch, MacOS, etc) and physical board game format – which we played. The objective is to place tiles on a game map that satisfy the various resource task challenges in a way that best uses all your resources before they run out while maximizing your final score. The world building was minimal, did not seem to flesh out a deeper cultural or societal commentary than others of this genre, and by doing so, was rather lacking in its engagement with players as a world-building game overall.
Following the article, we can first analyze the character setup, from main to side characters. The very first impression of this is that the characters we can become have essentially nothing to do with the world-building or the narrative at hand. We are supposed to be first person PoV of these characters, but beyond telling us how many dots we can check off for the next box, they have no other purpose. As there is no character to care about and we are not really the main character of any long journey/trek/storyline, the additional gain of having characters solely to unlock more game packs did not add to the game in any emotionally engaging way. We were merely completing a game map to maximize points. This would have been fine if there were other objectives than a tile-building game, like a strategic world-takeover setup like Catan where we compete against other players as ourselves (in this case, we are each the main characters). But the game mechanics did not seem to separate out the players as such, resulting in a collaborative, puzzle-like but rather repetitive experience with no emotional investment. It felt hard to get immersed in this world at all.
There is also minimal environmental storytelling. The game mechanics themselves were mainly placing tiles down to complete resource task challenges (rivers, tracks, villages, etc). There were no “5 senses activated” beyond visual puzzles to be solved to complete the most amount of task challenge points before running out of resources tiles. Perhaps this could be seen as societal commentary? That the higher up you go in the ranking of characters, the more chances you have of achieving a better score. The rich get richer and have more opportunities to win. As far as we played, there were no benenfits to being a lower ranking character (again lack of character relevance), and increasing your rank as a higher playing character does not add heightened danger or stakes to defend your character status. Which really again just reinstated the lack of need for the characters to be ranked as so. Furthermore, there was no language or dialogue exchanged between characters either that could have helped unlock further understanding of the culture/society of the world being built. One more thing on characters: the ranking and gender assignment of the characters felt a bit unnecessary given how little they matter. If there was no need for me to care if I was an actress or architect beyond how many little white dots I get to cross off, then why rank these professions and assign specific gender roles to them? Granted, I can appreciate they tried to make the characters more inclusive by not giving them all male nouns (eg default to actor, king, etc), but it feels a bit forced to first rank all professions then assign them gender on top of that for a world I did not imagine in my head nor see built. Huge caveat though, this could be because we didn’t play far enough into the game? We used one additional pack in the game night we had (we were Coachman), but honestly, if the game packs were not engaging enough for us to play more than one additional character at a time, one could see this as additional evidence for the lack of world-building and its effects on engaging players.
I don’t want to be too harsh though. Placing tiles is fun and thinking strategically was cool. It was also fun to see how many points we could get to keep collecting maximal resource task points. But it’s just from a world-building game perspective, this game may not be that competitive within its genre for the type of gameplay that players may expect going into this genre.
