Considering just how fundamental Tetris is to gaming history, it’s perhaps a little surprising that it isn’t featured more often in the merry-go-round of genre mashups that we so often see. Drop Duchy takes those iconic tetrominos and transforms them into land tiles, blending the block-dropping puzzle with deck building, roguelite progression and a theme that would feel fitting for a physical board game.
The lands are under threat and/or tyranny from belligerent armies and cruel overlords, and only you can build up your duchy piece by piece to defeat them. Presented with an 8×13 grid, you drop tiles in those oh-so-familiar shapes into place until you either run out of blocks or breach the top of the grid. Unlike Tetris, completing a row doesn’t vanish it from view, but instead rewards you with resources for each of the tiles it contains, adding permanence to every decision you make.
Mixed in with the standard land tiles are buildings of several types. Production buildings will draw resources from their surroundings, often transforming the land at the same time – a farm will turn plains into wheat fields, there’s forestry buildings that can clear woodland or draw upon it, mining tiles, and more. But then there’s the military buildings for both yourself and, in a combat round, for your enemies, and they will also have various conditions and modifiers to determine how many troops they supply. A watchtower needs to be near plains and fields to supply you with archers, a siege camp can reduce the units on nearby enemy buildings, the alarm tower recruits when aligned vertically or horizontally with enemy buildings, and on and on and on.
Thankfully, there’s only very minimal time pressure applied to you during this. Yes, blocks left alone will slowly start to drop, but you have so much time to consider your plans and look at the next three tiles coming to decide what to do. Additionally, you can put a block in reserve (which can effectively remove an enemy tile from the action, if you hold it to the end of the round), and swapping in and out of reserve resets the block to the top of the grid, so again, you’ve got acres of time to make your mind up.
At the end of a round with enemies is the combat phase, adding yet another layer to the puzzling. You connect up all of the military units, simplistically adding allied units together and subtracting enemies, but the order in which you do these is important. Units recruited are either light (sword), heavy (axe) or ranged (arrows), and there’s a typical triangle of strengths and weaknesses between them, giving a 1.5x multiplier so that 12 archers can take out 18 axes, for example. Merging units together unites them all as one unit type, determined by whichever had the higher number. Once again, you can play this out in so many different ways, toying with the multipliers and how stacks are added together.
If you come out the other side with enemies left over, that number is chipped away from your duchy’s health stat, so a “loss” isn’t necessarily the end of a run.
Each area builds up to a boss battle, the first of which constrains you within a subsection of the grid while having a large health count for you to defeat. The second and third then start to put even more strictures on your placement, at the penalty of bolstering the enemy forces, and they all make for a refreshing change of pace. However, there’s only three of these bosses, and while they can force your hand into disadvantageous block placement, they’re easy to defeat on a good run.
You chart your own path through the overworld, heading down different branches to decide what to tackle next. You can often choose between rounds that have combat and that are peaceful – though this boosts the impending boss battle – and you’re also shown the split between terrain types which could advantage your deck at that time. You also have resource spots to dole out lump sums, trading posts and more.
Even in your first few runs, there’s so many variable that emerge as you go from round to round. Each round rewards you with a choice of three building cards, and you can then spend resources to level them up and increase their efficacy and range – a level 3 farm is something to behold and incredibly empowering to a level 3 watchtower that it envelops in fields.
However, you’ll start to complete tasks and missions (like recruiting a certain number with a particular military building) for the overarching progression, unlocking new buildings, river terrain and buildings, new technology cards that act as passive modifiers, and eventually two more factions that play very differently to the starting one. Shifting from being able to quite purely focus on military buildings to needing to build a town around a belfry changes the tone and how you tackle the puzzle.
There’s also increasing difficulty levels and modifiers to put further restrictions on you, like not being able to huddle enemy buildings together or their power is amplified, or having a smaller grid to play on. You do have that compulsive feel of wanting to play another run in Drop Duchy, and these added challenges will give more to those that want them, but at the same time, I’m fairly content after half a dozen successful runs and seeing what each faction has to offer.