PAN'ORAMA
- Hubert Spala
- Aug 22
- 4 min read
Every so often, a game comes along that doesn’t just entertain you - it politely takes your hand, sits you down in a sunlit meadow, hands you a cup of chamomile tea, and whispers: “Relax. You’ve been working too hard. Here, have a hexagon.” That game is Pan’orama, a title so serene and comforting it should probably come with a complimentary yoga mat.
At its core, PAN'ORAMA is a tile-laying puzzle game in the same family as DORFROMANTIK - a comparison the developers are surely tired of hearing, but it’s unavoidable because the resemblance is uncanny. You’re presented with a seemingly endless stack of hexagonal tiles. Each featuring grasslands, forests, lakes, fields of wheat, or the occasional town doodad - and asked to place them together in the most harmonious way possible. Your reward? Points, expansions to your board, and the smug satisfaction of knowing you just built the cutest little world since Bob Ross picked up a paintbrush.
What differentiates this title from other tile layers is its lack of care about the hexes' rotation. Usually, when the designers use hexes, it is exactly for this purpose - to have the edges matter. Here they matter not! A peculiar choice, since it would also mean that the game would probably work with any tile shape, but there is something pleasant about good old hexes. Not to mention, they do offer more variety in placement, so that's that. The king and the core feature behind scoring points and scoring big is adjacency and retriggers. Adjacency is nothing new in this genre - you always want to match the groups of the same tiles, grow that forest, the rocky mountain, the charming village. Retriggers, however, are quite unique to PAN'ORAMA. Each placed tile can score multiple times, upgrading itself - giving more points but also changing in visual, levelling up to be more of itself. Bigger rocks, denser forests, more robust towns, and so on.
Normally, you could say, Hey, that is also nothing new! Of course, you can place multiple tiles on other placed tiles and score again, huff and scoff! Sure, but in other games of the type, you wouldn't just cram anything in, because the proper rotation and adjustment of the face types matter. Here tiles have no facing, but can have multiple types at once, being, for example, a tile that contains both Forest and Rock, or Town and Water, or even the delicious meadow - acting as the joker. But all that would be rudimentary, of little actual use in game, if not for the second big part of the game - the Structures.
The essence of PAN'ORAMA doesn't lie in the pretty, colorful vistas you can assemble with your cutesy hexes, but in clever combos of well-used buildings. Each time you reach a point threshold, you're offered a choice between 3 buildings, each offering a small building challenge - requiring particular pieces to complete - but also offering a big reward for wrapping them up. The rewards are crucial for keeping up with the game pace - you need to score big, you need to keep defeating the threshold to fuel up your stack of hexes. In addition, the goal of the game is to build up everything! And to make that happen consistently, you need a bit of a game plan.
Place a building that makes one or two types of biomes score more. Then juice it up with a building that instantly deployed a wide swathe of such biome tiles for a big score. Or maybe that building that makes your placement expand from the edges, giving you much more freedom to plan ahead, and prepare perfect spots for future constructions. Or big monuments that can score hugely if placed in the proper area of already existing clusters of terrain they care for. This is where the fun of PAN'ORAMA lies - a clever mix of strategic placement with a casual expansion of your landscape.
Heck, there is even one superbly cute addition if you're lacking just a few points from reaching the next goal, and do not want to burn through your thinning stack of hexes. Animals! Scattered across the growing vista, you can find various animals to 'click on' and pet, giving you a point for each foundling. It's an adorable way to score some extra points and interact more intimately with a scene you're developing. Heck, there's even a structure that boosts this form of scoring, so you can lean on it more heavily when needed. It's a lovely little bit to add charm to the already soothing, colorful game.
What makes the game so refreshing is its complete absence of punishment. There are no game-over screens, no timers barking at you, no looming penalties for a misplaced tile. Place something silly? That’s fine - it just becomes part of your board’s quirky personality. Your lakes might look like spaghetti, your forests may zigzag like a drunk squirrel, and your town quarter might awkwardly border a jagged rocky outcrop. But in PAN'ORAMA, imperfection is part of the charm.
Of course, no idyll is without its weeds. PAN'ORAMA's interface can occasionally feel a bit bare-bones, and its tutorial is so laid-back it barely explains itself. The game also doesn’t radically reinvent itself after a few sessions - its loop is soothing but repetitive, like sipping from the same cup of herbal tea every evening. Lovely, yes, but don’t expect dramatic variety. That said, asking this game to be more complex feels like missing the point. It’s not trying to be CIVILIZATION or FACTORIO. It’s not a life-consuming grand strategy. It’s a pocket-sized puzzle box, meant to be opened when you want a calm experience, not wrangling with challenging chaos.
If you're hankering for a relaxing game about colorful tiles being assembled to your heart's content that still offers a teensy bit of mental bite, you can't go wrong with this one. It's charming, it's easy to pick up, and it has just enough replay value to keep coming back now and then to enjoy a soothing session after a long, hard day.
