I’m vexed. Irritated, in fact, I’m genuinely annoyed by the fact that I had to put down Drop Duchy to come and write about it. It’s an easily bingeable puzzler that takes a few well-worn ideas from other games, drops them into a blender and pours out something that feels unique yet oddly familiar, a challenging and addictive mixture that you’ll see you losing hours to Drop Duchy before you know it.
The constituent parts come from deck builders, tactics games, the merest hint of a city builder and oddly, Tetris. As the ruler of an ever advancing army, you are tasked with placing familiarly shaped Tetromino pieces on a block dropping grid to gather resources and a sheer mass of soldiers before taking on the opposing army in rock/paper/scissors combat. This is where the first twist comes in. You are responsible for placing your own army and your opposing army, as well as land masses as they fall to the bottom of the grid. Many of these pieces are dictated by your own expanding card collection, each a different shape to fit into place to create full lines, as well you might expect, to gain further materials to expand your army. The trick is to place each of these in the most advantageous position you can whilst limiting the damage your opponents can do. It’s a battleground balancing act.
With some units gaining mutual benefit by being next to others, production buildings gaining power and resources from being placed next to a plain, forest or other terrain type and troops gaining the upper hand from well thought out positioning, Drop Duchy will keep you on your toes, juggling falling blocks into the most optimal positions possible. Add in the complication of having to also place your enemy on the ever-changing board and you’ve really only got yourself to blame for the scrapes you’ll find yourself in.
Once every block is in place from the familiar queue system on the left of your screen, your amassed forces will go toe to toe. Using an easy to grasp battle system, swords beat arrows, arrows beat axes, and axes beat swords. Simple. However, the second little twist is that your units can stack and depending upon your chosen order of turns, can transform on the battlefield, requiring some actual thought rather than relying on brute force of numbers alone. When the dust settles, you’ll either emerge victorious with a pile of resources to spend on buffing your forces or you’ll be hitting that restart button for another attempt.
In between each tactical transaction with your foes, you’ll be able to spend your amassed fortune of wheat, gold, stone and logs on upgrading and buying new cards, levelling up to take on ever changing conditions. There’s a constant push and pull at play as you’re forced to choose between optimising your production units for further resources or going all out with offensive options, never quite knowing what will be thrown at you next.
Battle your way through the branching map, a top down affair with numerous branching paths offering their own buffs and bonuses, and you’ll face an enemy fortress, a boss fight that will test your skills and forward planning. If you’ve not built up a sufficiently broad skilled army, it’ll be a short and sweet skirmish, seeing you quickly returning for another run to test out alternative tactics whilst praying to the RNG Gods for better resources this time.
Later on, further wrinkles are added to the Drop Duchy gameplay such as having to remove terrain types from the block pool, rendering some of your units useless and buffing others as well as adding further card categories to the mix, new technology that may will give you the upper hand, if only they appear at just the right time in the midst of battle. Completing challenges will grant points to be spent on a seemingly never ending technology tree, adding further mechanics and card types to your runs, complicating things even further and encouraging further playtime to open up the shiny new things on offer. I’m still surprised at just how many extra mechanics keep being added without becoming overwhelming, each building layer upon layer on the knowledge that you’ve already gained in a natural way.
Drop Duchy soon becomes a complex strategic web but it’s one that has well and truly caught me. It’s just ever so compelling and has that “one more go” magic that few games seem to have. Add in a total of three separate factions to play as and you’ve a potent recipe for losing your life to a creative and unique puzzler that is much more than the sum of its parts. Drop Duchy is a must-play for anyone who has even a passing love of puzzle or tactics games, an indie gem that shows even the oldest ideas can still delight and surprise when given just the right spin.
