In the beginning, the landscape consists of only one field with six possible cultivation areas. But on the right side, the randomly created stack of further hexagonal parts is already waiting. These contain plains, forests, fields, villages, and all kinds of mixed forms, so that you can also draw a few houses with trees or small rivers, meadows with a little train track, or countless other elements - so that a new landscape is always created along with fresh challenges.
Because for each placed tile you get points, whereby the type of placement is relevant. It makes sense to create cohesive landscapes like vast forests or large settlements by rotating the pieces accordingly as well as placing them with foresight. Tasks also pop up at regular intervals, requiring you to have a certain number of rivers or simply 50 trees in your forest, for example. Since these build on each other, you may soon need 100 trees, the constant development is worthwhile.
Thus one collects bonus points almost incidentally, while one can observe with a completion, how e.g. trains on the finished tracks or ships on the far branched river chug along. Over time, you unlock more tasks and tiles, including windmills, water stations, lavender biomes, fjords & Co. All of this enriches the landscape as well as the animal world but has only a subtle effect on the tactical possibilities, so that you layout your pieces almost meditatively, accompanied by cow mooing, rooster crowing, and piano sounds. At some point, the pile of pieces is used up anyway and then it's game over with a high score.
So there is a certain demand and you can also make mistakes, such as completing special landscapes too early so that they can no longer grow. The controls are precise with rotation and zoom, but it's not always clear how the parts deform or transform after you put them on, so there are sometimes involuntary dead ends. Although the automatic containment of e.g. watercourses also provides comfort, the result does not always correspond to the territorial idea - an undo function might have been helpful.
In the long run, the relaxed placement also runs out of steam a bit. Perhaps the announced creative mode can still remedy this. This is also because the aquarium effect, i.e. the pleasurable observation of small processes, is limited. At least there are small animations like migratory birds, turning windmill wheels & Co. in the pretty pastel scenery. The abstract board game design can thus create a certain aesthetics from a distance, but on the big screen, you miss more details up close - here it is ultimately not worth zooming in into a microcosm or even a village, so a mobile implementation for Android or iOS is obvious.
Conclusion
Dorfromantik is like Zen gaming for landscape gardeners. It is of course obvious that the analog classic Carcassonne was the inspiration for the game design here: After all, you place your tiles as appropriately as possible in meadows, forests, or settlements, just like in the board game, so that beautiful landscapes are created. Nevertheless, the relaxed laying tactics eventually run out of steam in terms of game depth and long-term motivation. However, anyone who wants to relax and play puzzles after work should keep Dorfromantik in mind.
