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Chill city-building game Dorfromantik is out now in Early Access

The tile-based village sim was featured during the Steam Games Festival earlier this year

Villages, forests, streams, the satisfying little click of wooden tiles snapping together – that’s what Dorfromantik is all about, and the chill little city-building game is now available in Early Access on Steam and GOG.

We first encountered Dorfromantik during the Steam Winter Games Festival earlier this year, and our editor Jordan was immediately enchanted by its homey feel and leisurely play. The idea is to grow a landscape using a set of hexagonal tiles, each containing some blend of woodland, railways, forests, and water features. Plunking down tiles reveals new objectives for you to complete, but you’ll have to be increasingly careful about how you place your tiles.

You see, the catch is that you’ve got to place tiles in the order they’re given – there’s no skipping, so you can find yourself in a bind if you have to find a home for a railway tile you can’t connect to any of your existing lines. “Inevitably, the stack throws you a curveball, forcing you to abandon your plans and improvise in order to meet your growing list of tasks,” Jordan writes. “Over time you end up with a patchwork of forests, canals, and hamlets.”

Here’s the trailer:

You can pick up Dorfromantik on either Steam or GOG, and you can find more similarly relaxing games over on our handy-dandy list.