Drop Duchy is what happens when Tetris and a deck-builder have a baby and then decide to bring it up as a medieval ruler. If that hybridisation doesn’t grab you, what if I told you it’s also one of the slickest and approachable deck-builders I’ve played?
I started up this game late on a Wednesday night with a prompt 8am start planned for the following day at my drama school.
After completing the tutorial, I settled in to play a round or two, and checked the clock a bit later only to find I’d played for 2 and a half hours without realising.
After a day of work carried on into the evening, I had the decision to either go to bed ready for my next 8am start, or get another round in. Needless to say, my duchy was calling my name, as were my multiple alarms the following morning.
Not As Complicated As It Seems
You start off as The Duchy, one of three factions alongside The Republic and The Order, with The Duchy being farming specialists.
Each step on the map consists of either collecting resources, battling enemies, or visiting builders. These range from universities to traders, with each building offering a different mechanic, from providing new cards to healing your hit points.
Once you’ve entered either into a neutral territory or a territory with enemies, then the main game begins, and you drop resource blocks, buildings, or enemies onto the map, Tetris style.
Depending on where you place each block, different synergies can be created, with the round continuing until either you’ve used all your blocks, or you’ve hit the top of the board.
After that, you enter a rock-paper-scissors-style battle system whereby you choose which of your buildings attack the enemies’ buildings, and in which order, to maximise damage.
For example, if you have some Heavy attackers (characterised by an axe), then you want to send them to the Light enemies (characterised by a sword) first as they’ll deal +50% damage.
Once all military buildings have attacked, the battle is either won or lost depending on whether there are enemies remaining, and you are either rewarded with gold or take damage. You then pick up your resources/the remains of your pride and move to the next stop on the map.
While it might seem quite complicated on the page, the game does a good job at explaining the mechanics and the tutorials can always be revisited if you’re stuck. Once you’re in the flow though, a full game can take around an hour, with synergies being pulled off and chains being created.
Let's Synergise!
An early example is when you utilise the Wood Clearer, Farm, and Watchtower together with some forest resources. The Wood Clearer changes the wood into plains, the Farm turns it into farmland, and then the Watchtower gains an extra 3 Ranged attackers (characterised by some arrows) per farm square.
Watching all of this play out with the lovely, weighty animations and sound is as satisfying as clearing a line in Tetris.
Overall, the graphics, music and sound are all stellar and polished, with bright colours, easily recognisable traits for each resource and building—making it easy to see what works with them at a glance—and a lovely medieval soundtrack which I would leave on just to study with.
One thing I wish the game would add in a future update would be more animation between the blocks – maybe a farmer wheelbarrowing wood from the nearest forest to the farm or an army having to get into a boat and travel across the river, just to make the kingdom feel more alive.
Also, while there is some reaction between blocks, with a river turning into a lake once four have been placed together, others don’t have any reaction, leaving mountains jutting off next to forests and seeming separate from everything else.
Move Up The Tree of Progress
Between runs, you have the option to upgrade your progress tree with currency collected from completing meta-missions, such as gaining a certain amount of food in a game or not placing any military buildings down in a round.
These offer new cards which will be added to each future deck pile, allowing for new strategies to form and even new mechanics such as Religion and Technology to add to the game’s depth even further.
I would warn new players, however, to make sure they take their time reading the progress tree and understanding what new mechanics will add to the game, rather than just upgrading everything at once.
When I unlocked Rivers, I then lost the next run, as suddenly I had a new environment to contend with which I wasn’t ready for.
I would have preferred if these new mechanics were unlocked in sections, potentially after beating a boss or winning a run, to make sure you have had enough time to understand the first group of systems before another layer is added.
Once you’ve got the hang of it though, these new systems allow for even more synergies and choices when it comes to what resources to focus on, giving experienced players a deep and rich vein of content to mine.
I Reserve Judgement
The game has multiple different difficulty levels, with each amending a variety of attributes to the run, from how much Mercenaries cost to whether you can place enemy units in reserve.
Reserving blocks is another Tetris mechanic, whereby if you don’t want to place a block straight away, you can hold it until later.
However, you can also place an enemy unit in reserve, essentially removing them from the game, providing a safety net against some of the more powerful cards.
If you want a bit more of a challenge though, you can unlock a card which gives you gold if you end the game without an enemy in reserve, so there’s a nice push and pull.
The boss fights at the end of each act change up the gameplay in unique ways, from The Wall’s constricting presence to traps for military buildings being added by The Keep. These make the final fights tense as one wrong move can spell disaster for your entire run.
UI Confusions
Now, there are a couple of UI issues which I would have liked to have seen ironed out in the early access period, namely having the rock-paper-scissors of the battle system placed into a triangle, similar to Fire Emblem.
The amount of time I spent having to rearrange the three hint blocks in my head to make sense of them depending on if I was thinking about my attacks or the enemies’ was frustrating.
There are also a couple of descriptions on the cards that could do with a once over to make them clearer – the Horse Stable is one such example.
It recruits ‘3 Light attackers’ with each space between it and another building. However, what it doesn’t mention is if there’s no other building nearby, then no scores get added.
These types of small confusions happen quite a lot with new cards added, leading to some lost battles due to me not understanding the mechanics until I saw them live. A small video/image tutorial of each card’s effect would be useful as well.
Closing Thoughts:
Drop Duchy is a fantastic addition to the deck-building genre, with a Tetris hybridisation that works slickly with all the other systems in the game. If you like relaxing but challenging games where you look at the clock and it’s suddenly 2am, Drop Duchy should definitely be on your radar. I’m looking forward to seeing what this team does next.
Pros & Cons
- An addictive, one-more-round, gameplay loop
- Accessible for deck-builder newbies and deep enough for veterans
- Lots of progression means something is always happening
- Clean graphics and style
- Nice music and sound effects
- Some slight UI issues/oversights
- The progress tree can make starting a new run overly confusing
- Few animations for the blocks makes the game feel quite flat
- Boss fights are the same for all three factions
