Planetiles looks like the next chill tile-'em-up for Dorfromantik fans

Tiles, they’re just pleasing. Plonk ‘em down, line ‘em up, watch pretty patterns emerge and your score multiply. Upcoming PC game Planetiles is about tiles - they’re right there in the name! - and looks to continue the immensely satisfying chill puzzling of Dorfromantik and its ilk.

If Dorfromantik fell onto the side of hex-loving occupied by Catan and modern-day Sid Meier’s Civilization, Planetiles looks to fall in with the polymino crowd of Tetris and pretty much every board game ever made by Uwe Rosenberg, the prolific German designer of Patchwork, A Feast for Odin and Agricola.

You’ll be laying down blocks of square tiles on a beautifully blue planet, populating your blank world with fields, deserts, mountains and more besides. Laying down things in the right way earns you points and bonuses for completing quests, letting you upgrade certain arrangements of tiles into unique features like oases, castles and rainforests that come with their own bonus effects. Being clever with your tile placement also stocks up your resources and tile reserve, letting you keep going and maximise your score.

There will be three different planets to fill up with your tiles, presenting more challenging puzzles on the larger planets. Other challenges will come through the negative effects of taking certain buildings, with solar storms and expiration date effects forcing players to place tiles quickly or making structures unusable for a certain amount of time, while natural disasters including volcanoes might burn away tiles and climate change can evaporate fields into sand.

While Planetiles’ main mode is a score rush to place as high as you can on a global leaderboard, the game will also have a more relaxed mode for just building freely without any pressure to be as ruthlessly efficient. Developers MythicOwl also plan to add a roguelike element to the game’s progression, with the mode currently in the works. The devs confirmed that no multiplier mode is planned, with a focus on the single-player experience.

Planetiles is planned for a release in the first few months of 2024, but you can go and check out its demo over on Steam now.