How To Play DorfRomantik

DorfRomantik is an awesome tile laying cooperative game with legacy / campaign progression and I love it (you can see why here in my review). I have written this blog to help get you started on your world-building adventure, so read on to find out how to play.

Set Up

DorfRomantik is a campaign / legacy game which means the game starts with very few components and as you progress you add more to the game. I will not spoil any progression in this how to play and instead will just teach the basics.

To get started shuffle the task tiles and place them on the table in a face down stack. Do the same with the landscape tiles, except you remove 3 at random from the game each time. Make 5 separate stacks of the task tokens face down corresponding with their types (forest, grain, village, track, stream).

You are now ready to play your first game.

How To Play

At the beginning of the game you must place 3 task tiles (1 at a time) each with a task token on it matching the type required (forest, grain, village, tracks or stream). Once you have done that you can start to place landscape tiles. All tiles must always be touching another tile already placed along at least 1 side. This way as the game progresses you will be making a world made up of lots of hexagons like a honeycomb.

The aim of the game is to score as many points as possible by completing the tasks. So for example if you had a forest task with the number 4 on it you would need to connect 4 tiles so that the forest runs over all 4 of them continuously.

When you complete a task token you move it to the side to score later (leaving the task tile in place) and add a new task tile (and token) to your game. There must always be 3 task tiles / tokens being worked on throughout the game (unless you managed to complete them all).

There are no placement rules or restrictions in DorfRomantik except tracks must only run into tracks and streams must only run into streams. You can have grain next to villages which are next to forests.

On a players turn they must turn over a new landscape tile and add it to the map unless there are less than 3 task tokens being worked on in which case they will need to add a new task tile and token.

To complete a task it must have the exact number required. If you ever joined two areas which causes one of your tasks to be over its requirements this would fail. You then remove the failed task token from the game.

You may not place a new task tile and token if by placing it you fail that task immediately. For example if you were placing a 5 stream token but you were adding it to a stream that was already 7 long it would immediately fail. However you may place a new landscape / task tile which causes a previously placed token to fail. Sometimes during the game you may need to do this as the token would be too difficult to complete.

Some tiles have flags on them. To score a flag you need to enclose that terrain type by the end of the game. If you managed to do that you will score 1 point per tile / flag in that chosen terrain type (forest, village, grain).