I’ve talked about my love of Tetris on the site before, and so whenever I see a rogue that borrows elements from my all-time favourite game, it piques my interest. And so, you won’t be surprised to hear that when Drop Duchy fell into my inbox, I decided to take it out for a little spin.
What is Drop Duchy?
Let’s start with the basics. Drop Duchy is a visually charming puzzle roguelite hybrid with Tetris-inspired gameplay and a heavy dose of influence drawn from the board game world. There’s a strong feudal theme with soldier and castle positioning woven into your decision-making as you arrange the tetrimino-shaped pieces of your kingdom for maximum effect on a limited board.
I mentioned influences, but the tabletop inspiration makes certain mechanics in Drop Duchy stand out, sometimes even awkwardly. At times, the experience reminded me of some of my favourite board games, including Carcassonne and Kingdomino, as I agonised about the precise positioning of the pieces I was putting on the board.
You’ll be agonising over each move, too, because it’s absolutely vital that you get each one right. One of the game’s most interesting twists is that you also have to position the units of your opponents. This allows you to control the flow of battle if you can make sure to get the arrangement on the board just right. I’ve lost on more than one occasion because of careless tile placement that reinforced an enemy unit instead of my own.
The path to power
Your journey through Drop Duchy will take you through a series of map challenges, enemy encounters, quick trades, and boss battles. You have a little counter which moves between locations on a limited branching map. You know the score by now.
The peaceful map missions are the more relaxed part of the game, but choosing them will make the final boss of that level a bit tougher to crack. In these encounters, you’re given 20-something tiles that represent your units/buildings, as well as the forests, fields, and rivers of your kingdom, and then you’re challenged with arranging them on the board as efficiently as possible.
Things get much more difficult when enemy units are involved. As mentioned up top, you must place your enemy’s buildings as well as your own. This means you can take an enemy base that requires a forest environment, and tuck it in the corner behind a river so it’s less effective in combat.
The combat of which I speak is a phase that takes place at the end of each round, once all of your pieces are in place. There are heavy, light, and archer units, and developer Sleepy Mill Studio deploys a Rock, Paper, Scissors system that you must observe to maximise the efficiency of each attack. You can ignore it, but your units will fall more easily if you do.
Winners and losers
Each round is decided by the aforementioned battle system, which at first I found quite frustrating. Eventually, however, I got used to how it worked, and after finally making some good decisions, I realised that I was starting to like it. It’s a simple system, but when you get it working, and the light infantry sweeps in and takes out the archers before they can rain hellfire down on your heavies, it satisfies.
Much more interesting than the combat system is the deckbuilding element. Like the combat, it took a while to warm up, I think because much of the game is held behind a progression system that, in my opinion, takes too long to reveal its more interesting cards and mechanics.
Once you’ve played for several hours, however, you’ll have unlocked new buildings to appear in the draft after each round, widening the pool of potential tactics available. Some of these cards are very technical, and honestly, I felt like the deck was a little bloated in places with buildings that have limited uses due to their specificity.
It took several hours to reveal some of Drop Duchy’s more convoluted elements; however, it was also several hours in I realised I was really engaged by the increasingly nuanced mechanics, the challenge of the boss battles, and the satisfying deckbuilding. It can be frustrating at times, and it took a bit too long to get going, but Drop Duchy proved to be a slow-burner that really clicked into place the further I explored.
Drop Duchy is out now on PC (Win), and I played the game via access kindly provided by the developer and their PR buds. Thank you!
