Have you ever wanted Tetris to be more like a kingdom management/strategy game? And a hint of roguelite in there, where you progress through the world, gathering resources, unlocking buildings, building troops, and fighting enemies. Isn’t that what Tetris is all about? What do you mean…hey, get back here!
Drop Duchy’s Gameplay Features Terrain, Troops, and Strategy
Tetris meets Carcassonne is the basic pitch, but there’s a little more to it than that. Basically, you have a Tetris-like grid with those familiar blocks falling at a leisurely pace (mercifully for those of us in our advanced years). In Drop Duchy, however, they make up different types of terrain: things like rivers, forests, and plains.
Oh, and sometimes, there are buildings that do things. Sometimes, they modify the terrain. A farm may turn Plains into Fields, generating food as a resource. There are buildings that may clear Forests and turn them into Plains, generating wood as a resource. Where it gets interesting is the synergies between these building types: clearing a Forest and turning it into a Plain may enable a Farm (if it is within range) to produce food on top of the wood you got from the forest, so there can be nice little production chains at play.
HOWEVER! There are also buildings that produce troops, which is where it gets interesting because there’s a rock-paper-scissors arrangement between guys with swords, guys with axes, and guys with bows. And your Duchy is under attack by the way, so some of the maps you’ll be playing on are peaceful and you’ll focus on gathering resources, but sometimes you’ll be facing an enemy…
AND…these unit production structures use various terrain types as well, so you want to place your troop production structures near the correct terrain to gather resources to build your dudes…BUT…you also control the placement of the enemy production buildings, so your perfectly set up production chain may work perfectly well for you, and then the game offers you…your enemy’s structure, so do you drop it in there and play yourself, toss it in the reserve slot off to the side and figure out how to screw him with tile placements later (there are limited tiles and the board fills up!), or make the best of the situation? WHAT DO YOU DO?!
That’s the basic gameplay. The roguelite wrapper is the usual map with nodes and choices: play on a peaceful map and gather resources, but maybe the final boss gets more HP. Fight an enemy. Do you choose the map with more plains or more rivers? Hey, what kind of resource do you want to choose?
Buuuut! There’s also a “deckbuilding” element because you use the resources you gather to buy new tiles and unlock new buildings. There are also limits on what tiles you can bring into each map, but you can unlock more slots with those very same resources, and you can upgrade your deck. This naturally plays into terrain choices: If you’ve built heavily around gathering wood from forests to build archers, you probably want to aim for maps with lots of forest tiles, but then again, those rivers do give lots of gold, which you can spend to restore your overall defense (think HP, if it hits 0, you lose the run and restart).
Annnnd! Some buildings can work together if they are within range of each other, just the way the resource collection buildings can. So if you place them properly, you can get archers AND swordsmen AND axemen AND a production bonus to all your military units; or you can whiff and place an enemy building in the spot you saved for YOUR building and then HE gets the bonus, and RIP.
Should You Keep an Eye on Drop Duchy?
Drop Duchy is one of those wild indie games that comes out every now and then that highlights why indie gaming is so great: No major studio would do something so wacky. It’s a demo, so obviously it’s impossible to say what the full version looks like, but this early look shows the basic systems are there and they work great. In terms of replayability, Classic mode with Easy and Normal difficulty was the only thing available in the demo aside from the tutorial, but there are more difficulties planned. The Duchy was the only faction available BUT I could see The Republic and The Order were coming and Missions were also coming. Territory control, and resource management Tetris may not have been on your list…but maybe it should be.