Dorfromantik is a bucolic little cityscaping puzzler

Dorfromantik is an upcoming peaceful, strategic little puzzle game that has you laying tiles to create a lovely little countryside of hexagonal tiles. It's a bucolic idyll of rolling fields and dense forests, little meadows, twee railways, and little rivers. It's coming this spring from Toukana Interactive, and there's a demo you can play right now on itch.io.

The basics are simple. You have a stack tiles with different features. Things like woods, houses, and fields can be placed anywhere. Other things can only be placed near their like—train tracks must continue, as must canals or rivers. To get more and more tiles, you have to fulfill quests: Make a forest larger, or a village big, but not too big, or a canal of a certain length. It's a nice thing to chase if you're a score-chaser, while remaining relaxed enough for those who just want a nice game to chill to. The full game release will have tiles to unlock and different biomes to place.

I like how it looks and plays, given the demo. It reminds me of Islanders, the super-chill city builder from a few years back, in that it's just as much puzzle as strategy game. You can find it on both itch.io and Steam.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.