In a weird way, I feel ever so slightly sorry for the team of students who madeDorfromantik.
Call it Joseph Heller Syndrome: first time out and they’ve made a classic.
Does that leave them confused?
I suspect not, and this is why I only feel ever so slightly sorry for the team.
They have brought happiness to hundreds of thousands of us around the world.
That kind of feeling sticks around, I think.
I play Dorfromantik an awful lot.
It’s a hex-based tile game about making landscapes.
Eventually, though, you run out.
You get to see the whole thing as if for the first time.
I’m trying to unlock the Midwinter biome.
Biomes are unlockable prizes that give the landscape a certain colour scheme or vibe.
Midwinter does what you’d expect it to: it makes it look like winter.
Christmas in the countryside!
Dorfromantik is the most Masefield game of all time when you’re playing with Midwinter.
You hover above the landscape, above the woods and fields and little copses.
I feel a bit like Santa.
Dorfromantik is very much at home on the Switch.
I’ve been thinking about why I felt, very early on, that this game was special.
And it’s not just the setting or the joy of watching a forest lazily grow across the land.
Take a 4X - okay, strategy rather than tactics, but the point holds.
Not all of those Xes are equally exciting.
The first two, explore and expand, always fill me with giddiness.
Not so sure about Exploit and Exterminate.
And yet I know people who love those two and find the first parts of the game a drag.
Dorfromantik, however, has me from the first tile to the last.
And it’s because the choices you’re making with each placement remain interesting.
It’s tactical at this point, but I still don’t want it look naff.
The two concerns never completely over-rule one another.
Enjoy it, but don’t overbusy yourself and the ground you live upon.
To put it another way, Explore but don’t Exploit.
