Dorfromantik board game adaptation wins Spiel des Jahres award

The Spiel des Jahres is an award for board and card games, created in 1978 with the purpose of rewarding family-friendly game design, and promoting excellent games in the German market. The 2023 Spiel des Jahres winner has been revealed, and for the first time ever, the honor goes to a physical adaptation of a videogame.

The Spiel des Jahres winner for 2023 goes to Dorfromantik: The Board Game, which is an adaptation of Dorfromantik on Switch. With Dorfromantik, you can immerse yourself in a quiet, peaceful world at any time and take a break from everyday life. At the same time, Dorfromantik offers a challenge for those who are looking for one: To beat the highscore, you need to carefully plan and strategically place your tiles.

You start with a stack of procedurally generated tiles. One after the other, you draw the top tile of the stack, place it on one available slot and rotate for the best fit. Thereby groups and combinations of landscapes are formed, such as forests, villages or water bodies, and you are rewarded with points depending on how well the tile fits. As you expand the landscape, you can advance into new, colorful biomes and discover pre-placed game objects that give you long-term tasks. Through these tasks you can unlock new tiles, new biomes and new quests.

In Dorfromantik: The Board Game, up to six players work together to lay hexagonal tiles to create a beautiful landscape and try to fulfill the orders of the population, while at the same time laying as long a track and as long a river as possible, but also taking into account the flags that provide points in enclosed areas. The better the players manage to do this, the more points they can score at the end. In the course of the replayable campaign, the points earned can be used to unlock new tiles that are hidden in initially locked boxes. These pose new, additional tasks for the players and make it possible to raise the high score higher and higher.

If you’d like to read more about the original Dorfromantic, you can find the eShop listing here. If you’d like to snag the board game adaptation, that is available here.