Village Romance Review: a blissful, minimalist chill-out game

The German word “dorfromantik” can be literally translated as “village antiquity”. Its true meaning is more indescribable. In a recent Interview with Eurogamerthe developers of village romance (the game) said the word is “usually used to describe that nostalgic feeling you get when you long for being in the country.” Village romance is a state of mind.

That couldn’t be more fitting for this exquisite chillout game that’s just emerged from a year of early access. village romance is a peaceful puzzle: kind of minimalistic, meditative katan. You build a landscape of hexagonal tiles and create pine forests, patchwork quilts, meandering rivers, spinning train tracks and colorful little towns made of red brick. (No roads, though.) And that’s it. There is no resource production or cost to think about – no competition, no population, no politics, no winning, no losing. You are only rated on how well your tiles fit together. Their only goals are harmony and beauty.

To play village romance is relaxing. You could even say it’s an aesthetic cleanse. The landscapes, drawn in loose strokes and languid pastels and animated with puffing steam engines, tugboats and circling seabirds, are beautiful and toylike. It’s just a beautiful place. Time doesn’t pass here, and nobody needs anything from you. Nothing counts down while you consider placing your next tile; Give yourself as much time as you want. The game plays just as well in five minutes between work sprints as it does in three hours of bliss.

None of that is supposed to say that village romance however, is aimless or smooth. In fact, it’s quite tightly shaped and controlled. Developer Toukana – a group of four game design students from Berlin – combines elements of strategy, puzzle and solitaire-style games of chance in a simple, finely tuned design.

The stones you place are dealt from a random stack that decreases as the game progresses. To keep your game going, grow your landscape, and increase your score, you must earn more tiles by completing quests. These appear as you place certain tiles and challenge you to match more and more of each of the five landscape elements: dozens of water tiles, hundreds of houses, thousands of trees. For example, one tile might ask to be connected to at least 36 other houses, while another might ask you to collect exactly 13 houses and no more. On completion, some quests raise a flag that rewards you with even more tiles if you successfully close the town or forest or waterway by surrounding it with other landscape elements to prevent further development.

This wonderfully simple set of rules has ramifications, and to Toukana’s immense credit, those ramifications have ramifications both aesthetically and in terms of game balance. village romance encourages diligence and strategy, but discourages optimization. You cannot succeed in this game by building a sprawling metropolis in one corner of the map, a vast forest in another, and a vast agricultural prairie in a third. The tiles also counteract this notion, as they randomly mix landscape elements, prompting you for unexpected expansions and new designs with every quest you undertake. This is a very clean and logical system designed to produce unexpected, organic results. That’s an incredible achievement.

The biggest challenges initially seem to be the rail and river tiles, which can only be placed next to others of their kind or next to specific endpoints. These can easily block your card’s expansion while you wait for the “ideal” tile to appear in the deck. Instead of the steady, even bloom you’re instinctively looking for, unsightly knots and gaps appear. The rivers and railroads can introduce a nagging touch of frustration village romance‘s calm and satisfying mental tune – but the game probably would to easy without her.

After my first few games of village romance, the more I learned about the game’s design and tried to get into it, the worse I would do. My scores continued to decline; my stack always ran dry. What happened? I tried too hard to play the system. I lumped together too many quests – four or five forest quests in a single stand of trees – to aim for efficiency, but in doing so broke the game’s steady rhythm. This is not a game of ambition. It can be difficult for a mind trained in video game reward systems to break the habit of escalation and learn its sluggish pace.

Eventually I slowed down. I paid less attention to quests and more to tile matching. You get points for matching the edges of tiles: tree to tree, house to house, grass to grass, and so on. A perfect match along all six edges awards you 60 points and an extra tile. In other words: it looks better. I once made harmony my goal instead of efficiency, village romance met me halfway; My results were better, my runs longer, my cards nicer.

This playstyle is reinforced with one of the most subtle and best additions of the 1.0 update, making matching edges more prominent and giving satisfying pop to perfect placements. Elsewhere there are new music titles, all of which belong to the genre “extremely tasteful ambience that sounds OK with Kuhgemuh”. You can now pursue more of the meta goals, which will reward you with new tile types and cosmetic adjustments, including beautiful seasonal “biomes”. And there are several new ways to play alongside the Classic and Creative modes that were already present in Early Access.

For example, Quick Mode has a fixed limit of 75 tiles and lasts anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour. Hard mode has fewer quests and more complex tiles to complete. Custom mode lets you tinker with the probabilities of scenery elements, quests, and other parameters, and then share your settings with other players, with or without the tile stack seed. My favorite, the monthly mode, is a fixed seed and custom game setup that changes monthly, which should be a fun place for the community to challenge each other on the leaderboards.

It’s all welcome, and it does village romance a more complete and rewarding experience. But really, this is one of those games for which the Early Access status was a little wrong, not because there was no room for improvement or additional features, but because its premise was so fully and perfectly executed from the start. Add too much to it or do anything that might upset its delicate balance between friction and flow, between logic and naturalism, and it would have been ruined. But the Toukana team knows better. They are at peace, strolling through the landscape of the mind.

village romance is now available on Windows PCs. The game has been verified on PC using a download code provided by Toukana Interactive. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. You can find For more information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy, click here.