Drop Duchy’s Tetris-Inspired Strategy Is A Fantastic Mashup I Never Would Have Expected
Building something new out of the oldest of old school.
You can’t really improve on Tetris. Other falling-block puzzles like Lumines and Meteos have added their own take on its concept, but only the original has endured for decades, with even its spinoffs and reimaginings becoming some of the best puzzle games around. While no one can beat Tetris at its own game, its basic formula still leaves plenty of room for experimentation, and occasionally they can turn out as well as a captivating new roguelike on Steam.
Drop Duchy first caught my eye with a demo at a recent Steam Next Fest. A roguelike take on Tetris was just too weird of an idea to ignore, but after giving it a shot, I found it had a lot more going for it than a silly premise. With the full game now out on Steam, it turns out Drop Duchy is a deeper, more satisfying strategy game than I would have imagined, all built on the idea of stacking blocks.
Drop Duchy’s deckbuilding twist on Tetris may sound strange, but it’s a delightfully original puzzle game.
The goal of Drop Duchy is to build a kingdom one block at a time, collecting resources and fighting off rivals along the way. The basics are easy to grasp for anyone who’s played Tetris, which I assume is just about everybody. Blocks fall from the sky, all made of two to three tiles, and your job is to place them in the best order on a grid. When you form a complete line, it don’t disappear like it would in Tetris, but instead grants you resources depending on the block’s composition. Fields give you food, forests give you lumber, and so on. At first, it’s a bit unclear what these resources mean and how you might want to prioritize them, but it’s soon revealed that they’re used to add new cards to your hand, though it’s still not always obvious which you should focus on at a given time.
Those cards represent different buildings, the backbone of your new kingdom. These are placed just like normal blocks, after falling in a random order along with terrain. Early on, you’ll get farms that turn empty plains into fertile fields and wood clearers that convert forests back to plains, which grant you bonus resources. Later on, additional terrain types like mountains and water appear, and new building cards let you make use of them as well.
Not all is peaceful in your blocky kingdom, though, and the real strategy of Drop Duchy kicks in with military cards. Mixed in with the calm stages where you only need to gather resources are those with enemies on the board. At the start of these stages, you’ll see exactly which military buildings your opponent has so you can plan your own strategy around the game’s rock-paper-scissors system, where arrows beat axes, axes beat swords, and swords beat arrows.
Drop Duchy transforms Tetris into a challenging strategy game.
You place enemy buildings just like you do your own, and a big part of winning battles is placing them where they’ll do the least damage. If a hostile camp gains three archers for each nearby field, find a way to surround it with forests. If it gets a bonus for touching another enemy card, make sure it’s off in a corner on its own. Your own military cards play by the same rules, and finding ways to make sure you get the most synergy out of your cards and blocks while your foe gets none is a satisfying, sometimes overwhelming, brain teaser. A unique battle system has you then decide which order units attack each other in to make the most of your advantage, adding another unexpected twist to an already challenging puzzle.
That all adds up to a charming puzzle roguelike that manages to carve out its own identity even as it takes inspiration from what’s likely the most recognizable game ever made. I’m a big fan of games that take an extremely well known premise and utterly transform it, and Drop Duchy is up there with the best of them. Just trying to clear lines like you’re playing Tetris won’t win the day, but ignoring the fundamentals of building lines will get you into trouble, too. Drop Duchy is a far more original game than a quick glance might suggest, and its unique take on strategy makes it one of the best surprises so far this year.
