We must have said it about a hundred times but only near the end does it occur to me to actually ask what it means – what Dorfromantik means. I still don’t know even after a year of playing the game in early access, and now the game’s coming out, in 1.0, it seems like a good time to ask. Because it does have a meaning, and as I discover, the meaning is perfect.
Understanding it depends a lot on being German, because that’s where the team, Toukana, is from. Toukana is four people: Timo Falcke, Sandro Heuberger, Luca Langenberg and Zwi Zwausch, and they met doing a game design degree in Berlin. “Dorfromantik” is a German word. “An older word,” Zwi Zausch tells me in a video call they all join me for. “And it’s usually used to describe the kind of nostalgic feeling you get when you long to be in the countryside.”
Perfect, isn’t it? The closest word we have in English is bucolic, which sounds like something to do with the plague.
The name didn’t stick straight away. They used it as a placeholder because it described the feeling they were going for, and slowly, it grew on them. They liked the idea of using a German name for a German game, though some developer friends advised them against it. English audiences wouldn’t like it, they said. But if English speakers can get used to words like Kindergarten and Zeitgeist, Toukana reasoned, surely Dorfromantik would stand a chance too. So it stuck. And now you know what it means.
Dorfromantik, the game, is a tile-laying game where you slowly build a countryside one hexagonal tile at a time. The idea is to match the sides of the tiles so that you connect fields or trees or houses to make larger collections of them – forests and towns and farmland. And it isn’t only done for show: behind it is a points-based score system, which racks up the more pieces you place – pieces that are replenished when fulfilling missions, which require forests of a certain amount of trees, or towns of a certain amount of houses, and so on, in the game.