Excuse me, waiter, there is a Tetris in my deckbuilding soup. As a combination of roguelike deckbuilder, tactics game, and tetramino tile-builder, Drop Duchy is an interesting mash-up when it works and a somewhat messy experiment when it doesn’t. It’s intriguing to see the parts of these many genres falling towards a grander strategic goal, even if they don’t always click into place as neatly as expected.
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You play as a wee nation devoted to bricklaying and advancing up an oft-branching road towards an end-of-act boss fight. Along the way you’ll hit encounters which manifest as a familiar Tetris-style tile-dropping screen. Except every tetramino you plop down has special properties. Some are covered in forest, others form rivers, and the most important are buildings. Little L-shaped harbours or big 2 x 2 block strongholds. Some of the smallest are single-tile farms, windmills, or watchtowers. And each has its uses, be it for the production of resources like wood and wheat, or for the gathering of troops.
You’ll need them. Because you’re not only slapping down your own military buildings, but also those of your red opponent. This gives you control over where they’ll land, meaning you can often prevent your foes benefitting from the landscape around them. But sometimes, thanks to the chaotic nature of the drop order, there will simply be no good place for a piece to go. It’s a mixed game of both careful planning and improvising with the tiles you’ve got.
You do this until you’ve hit the ceiling of the board. But what heralds a game over in Tetris just starts a big fight in Drop Duchy. The building phase ends and a quick ruckus ensues. You have to choose the order in which units brawl. This is mostly a rock > paper > scissors matter, in which archers are stronger than axemen, axemen are stronger than swordsmen, and swordsmen wreck archers. But sheer numbers can also overwhelm, so it’s not always a straightforward case of dunking on the right enemy type. You can simply march your troops into one big gang before assaulting the enemy, but you’ll have to be wary, because a gang of 40 rowdy archers will assimilate a band of 12 axe wielders to create 52 archers instead. An all-out assault with the wrong type of troop can end poorly.
These tactical tit-for-tats can feel like dryly going through the motions next to the forthright battlefield building. Fights are simple in principle, but contrived enough that every battle phase has to come accompanied with a screen-filling cheatsheet reminding you of the combat rules. It’s not unmanageable, just very boardgamey. Part of me wishes the military side of things was more streamlined – a brawl that would simply auto-resolve. By the time the armies are facing off, I found the encounters’ true brain-tickles were over.
In true roguelike metamanner, you gather more cards along the way. These basically unlock more tile types to drop. A training ground will send extra troops to nearby military buildings. The water fortress will fill up with soldiers so long as you lay enough river tiles. An old tower will gain a huge number of watchmen if you manage to completely surround it with mountain terrain.
You begin to use these buildings and tiles in clever combinations. A watchtower will create archers for every unobstructed plain around it. So you can use a wood clearer’s hut to cut down adjacent forested tiles, meaning more archers. Even better, throw down a farm next to those plains to turn the land into golden wheat, and the watchtower will recruit yet more bowmen in thanks.
This is the simplest example of how terrain-changing and careful placement is key to boosting your soldier count. But there are dozens of other buildings to unlock and figure out, from money-grubbing tax collectors to riverside guardposts. The prison offers a hefty 40 fighters right off the bat, but if the enemy manages to muster even slightly more men next door to it, all those cowardly inmates will vanish before the fight even starts. Pah!
As a Tetris fiend, a few things threw me off. You’ve got the existence of off-brand tetramino shapes (single squares, small L-shapes) which always feels weird to traditionalists. And you now have to think about the “material” of the shape you’re dropping. Forested longboys won’t necessarily be as useful as a longboy made of wasteland. Blunders of placement in Tetris can often be triaged and fixed thanks to the ongoing vanishing of completed lines. Here, you can’t do that (at least it’s not a power I’ve yet encountered). Which means simple errors and slippy fingers in Drop Duchy can be devastating, resulting in a quick loss or a massive waste of resources. In Tetris that feeling of having fluffed it does happen, but it doesn’t affect your next game. Here, bloopers can stack. I’ve had a few instances of knowing my run was doomed halfway through a fight. This can be, at times, a very give-uppable game.
That is especially true when it comes to boss fights. These break from the usual pattern and flow of other encounters, and most are not well explained. One boss, the Dungeon, informs you it will spit out mercenary pieces filled with soldiers unless you pay a bribe. But how you actually pay that bribe to prevent the influx of enemies isn’t explained (you’re supposed to harvest resources with production cards – a playing style I rarely adopted, because military cards are simply more useful). Some bosses can feel reliant on getting lucky with the drop order. And heaven help you if you’re fighting the first boss (a low wall that restricts the play area) as the slow-burning Republic faction.
This faction encourages you to build a bigger and bigger city, stomaching early defeats while gathering enough money, citizens, and other resources to power you through later fights. But it relies a lot on upgrading cards, a much more cumbersome process than the simpler piece gathering of the default Duchy faction. Playing as the Republic feels like being unable to use the game’s most interesting tactics. Beating that first boss becomes a matter of grinding through tickboxy tasks to climb the progress tree in a search for ripe fruit that may help future runs.
Oddly, Drop Duchy doesn’t kill you outright for losing an encounter. Instead, you have an overworld health bar, and you’ll lose an amount of health equal to the number of enemy troops left behind on the board. With a default of 50 health you can technically scrape through an encounter with 49 enemy axe dudes wailing on you when the final whistle blows. It feels a little strange to sometimes fail spectacularly but remain alive. It’s forgiving in parts, but to some that might sap away some of the central brutality of a roguelike.
I have a small heap of other misgivings. Pieces could be a lot more visually distinct from one another (is this little log cabin the hunting lodge, road house, wood clearer, or lumber camp?) and the messy symbol-strewn rules text on cards can sometimes slide right through my brain without ever finding purchase. You also can’t read the effects of locked cards further ahead in the skill tree, so forget precisely planning how to spend your skill points.
Ultimately, Drop Duchy is an intelligent bit of work, and it’s admirable as an example of elevator pitch creativity (“what if Tetris but a medieval deckbuilding roguelike?”). The trouble is that, in design terms, I find that the elegance of Tetris clashes with the complexity of both deckbuilding and tactical numberwang. Drop Duchy feels like it is trying to force itself into the “endlessly replayable” box by adding more to what is, already, the most endlessly replayable game on planet earth. Playing novel takes on Tetris always feels like playing a variation of chess. I love to see it, but in the act of adaptation something is often lost.
Except in this case, too much is gained. Tetris is a game of removal, of emptying a space – not filling it. The explicit goal is to have as empty a field as possible. Some deckbuilders do mimic this philosophy. Think of the way Slay The Spire encourages removing cards from your deck, paring things back, streamlining your loadout until you are flicking out the same five cards on hypereffective repeat. Drop Duchy doesn’t go for this at all. It is an additive game, not a subtractive one. Here, cards and coins and troops and numbers all hang off the leanest colt in video games history, like some wild ass Buckaroo. This approach doesn’t make the game bad by any means, but it does explain why it feels, to me, at odds with its principle puzzle inspiration. It’s a smart roguelike for anyone who loves the core ingredients, but not everything lines up.