There’s three pillars that make up Drop Duchy: Tetris, Roguelikes and deckbuilding. The latter two are very commonly combined, to the point that deckbuilding would synonymous with Roguelikes if it wasn’t also being shoved into RPGs, strategy games and everything else that we can come up with. The block-dropping joys of Tetris, though? Well, that’s more difficult to add into the blender with other genres. Drop Duchy does it, though, the team at Sleepy Mills Studios obviously not knowing any better. Having played the new demo on Steam, that’s definitely not a bad thing.
It’s the Tetris of it all that does make up the bulk of this game, with the other elements adding further puzzling peril and tension to how you drop different blocks from the top of the screen, down onto the grid below. There’s very little of the harried time pressure of traditional Tetris, though, and you’re not looking to score by clearing lines of the board. Instead, each Tetromino shape is a a chunk of land or a building that you’re slotting down onto the board to craft a neat 8×13 slice of terrain.
Through combining these you earn resources at the end of a board’s completion. Plains, forests and rivers will award crops, wood and gold respectively as you complete their line, but buildings are also great modifiers. A farm will turn nearby plains into fields of wheat that boost the amount of food you get, and a wood clearer can make space in a radius, both affecting their surroundings dynamically as you drop more blocks around them. Alternatively you might want to keep the woods combined, so that a lumber camp, for example, can harvest from each connected forest square.
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But then there’s the stages which introduce enemies and combat. Now you’ll have to drop military buildings that can, for example, create archers at a watchtower for adjacent plains and fields, or swordsmen for nearby woods and so on. You’re placing both your own military buildings and those of the enemy, having to calculate the same puzzle in opposite directions to try and give your army the best odds.
Once a combat board has been completed, it’s then time for another additional puzzle linking up all the military buildings in turn, both friend and foe, using a traditional triangle of strengths and weaknesses to send archers against axemen, axemen against swordsmen and try to get the sums right so that you wipe out the enemy.
You can pick your path through an overworld, from one kind of board with one particular blend of plains, forests and rivers, to the next, choosing whether to take on combat or avoid it, and picking resource bonuses as you go as well. It builds up to a boss encounter known as The Wall, where a strict… well, it’s a wall that forces you to try and be as perfect as possible with your block dropping, any excess spaces left bolstering the enemy military that you’re trying to off.
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It’s a tricky task to prepare for, but that’s the joy of roguelites where each run can give you different opportunities, where a metagame of unlocks can further your chances. After each board, you can unlock an additional card, slotting a new building into your possible deck, or giving a bigger modifier that can increase your survivability, resource gathering, damage output and more. Before each board, you can choose which buildings to take with you, tailoring your deck to the mix of land tiles that you’ll have and to the enemies that you might be facing. Oh, and successfully break through a boss battle and you’ll reach the next act, introducing new resource types, new buildings and more.
But that’s something for the full game. What we played was the freshly released demo for Drop Duchy, bringing the first full act, limiting you to plains and forests, and 21 of the more than 110 cards that will be available for the full launch.
It’s a little taster of the broader game, and just light enough to pique my interest without giving too much away for the full game that’s coming out in April.
