Dorfromantik: My Favorite Digital Mechanism

Jamey discusses his favorite mechanism in the digital tile-placement game, Dorfromantik.
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[@gmchaffie]

I love in Lost Ruins of Arnak, how you can build a deck that allows you to draw more cards, and gather enough resources to extend your round much longer than your opponent and keep using actions to squeeze out a few more resources to let you get a few more turns in.

[@bexserver]

Used to love playing the video game, the sounds of the train and ducks were very comforting. Bought the board game as soon as a could, my partner and I had great fun playing through the campaign. Very good game!

[@asaswain1031]

The mechanic of extending my round reminds me a lot of playing Tapestry, where I’m trying to prolong having to take an income turn.

[@gmchaffie]

I second this! I'm always trying to stretch those resources as far as I can go that era.

[@maheshalur6361]

In Foundations of Rome, the end of each era can be strategically ended to prevent others from building before scoring. This is just one of many ways that strategy is built beneath the surface in FOR.

[@jameystegmaier]

I haven't yet gone that deep into Foundations of Rome, but that's a keen observation!

[@hpshovecraft]

Just an all-around classic core mechanism, that game length can be extended by the player. At first it was hard for me to narrow it down to just one because it's so ubiquitous, and the more I thought about it, the more different implementations I could remember. (I started off thinking about arcade racers and how the extend system got used in Crazy Taxi)
But luckily it reminded me of a game I'd forgotten, and will probably return to. One of my favourite early roguelikes (for me, anyways, I never played the big early Rogue derivates like NetHack and Angband) was a very polished indie game called Reaping the Dungeon (typical 2D dungeon crawl interface with ASCII-sized spaces but actual graphics) about seemingly being stranded on a hostile alien world. It uses an oxygen mechanic where every action decreases your oxygen by 1, but you start the game with 9500 of it, so you know it to be a pressure but you have a ton of play guaranteed.
There are two specific things I love about the way the game handles it. Probably the most common way to recover oxygen is through plants, but you can't harvest it until the plant is mature. You start the game with a device (using it costs energy, another limited resource) that tells you how many turns it will be until the plant is ready to be harvested. If it's a short time you can just wait, but otherwise you probably ought to use your oxygen to do some exploring and remember to make it back to that place when the time is right.
The second, and the game shows you this immediately when you start by putting a shop next to you, is that in shops you can buy oxygen. During the game you'll explore and find treasure that you can sell at shops for credits, to spend on the things you need. But the cost of things fluctuates (as a player you see the current price and the "normal" price), so you have this great context-dependent decision of when to buy. If you spend all your money on more turns, you're not spending it on things like health, and carrying capacity, and weapons to fight monsters.
You can see what it looks like here, though I'm not sure how stable it is to play online: classicreload.com/reaping-the-dungeon.html
Genuinely can't say enough good things about it, the last of which is the quote that the designer put on the quit screen: "Progress is being made as long as each mistake is a new one."

[@jameystegmaier]

Thanks so much for sharing that game--I definitely wouldn't otherwise have heard of it.

[@hpshovecraft]

@@jameystegmaier I've started replaying it, and it really is as fun as I remembered.
One thing I'd forgotten is that the game puts an additional tension on your oxygen. Exploration is costly, so the game offers you a huge bonus if you eliminate all the monsters on a floor before dropping down (and there is no returning to previous floors). You even get to pick between four different ones (I believe randomly generated), so you can take what suits your current situation. My last offer was Experience, Health, Currency, or Consumables. It also softens the frustration that can come with having to scour a large map by being liberal with single-use spots on the map that will give you information of your choice (Where is the exit? How many enemies are left?, etc) and you can find consumables that will show you all of a specific thing (Treasure, Monsters, etc) on your map, including unexplored areas.
Also one of the things you can improve with experience is oxygen-used-per-move, though it is very costly.

[@jameystegmaier]

@@hpshovecraft I played a game for a bit over this weekend that reminds me of some of the things you're saying--I recommend trying out the demo of Blue Prince on Steam.

[@hpshovecraft]

@@jameystegmaier Awesome, I'll look into it. Thanks!