Drop Duchy Just Didn't Connect for Me
- Antal Bokor
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
An ancient video game proverb says that you shouldn’t mix too many genres together, lest you water them both down and end up producing some hodgepodge creation that ends up not being very fun. That hasn’t been true for a long time now, but sometimes it pops back up in my mind when I play a game that fails to blend genres in a satisfying way. And I couldn’t get that out of my head the entire time I was playing Drop Duchy.
Drop Duchy is a puzzle game that mixes tetrimino puzzling and a bit of real time strategy. I mean, kind of. It’s not really fair to call it real time strategy, but it’s not quite a colony builder, either. On Drop Duchy’s store page on Steam, it describes it a “rogue-lite hybrid,” which is another ingredient in this slurry: roguelite deckbuilding.
All of these things are things I like. I admit I haven’t been playing a lot of real-time strategy games and colony builders lately, but I’m a sucker for Tetris, puzzlers, and I’m always up for some roguelike deckbuilding, especially Monster Train and Slay the Spire.
Drop Duchy plays out in essentially two phase: the puzzle phase, where you place your blocks and your enemy’s blocks in a pseudo game of Tetris. Like Tetris, all of the regular tetriminoes are there, but there are a couple of extra shapes. The Tetris portion of Drop Duchy is a head scratcher to me. The challenge behind the original Tetris is the time pressure as the blocks descend. Drop Duchy has no such time pressure. This makes sense, as you would have to strategize where to put your pieces while also figuring out what those pieces do. Each completed line in Drop Duchy gives you the resources based on what was on that line: gold, wheat, or wood.
The challenge of the Tetris portion isn’t just whether you can make the pieces fit together (which is mostly simple with no time pressure) but also to make them fit where they optimally contribute. Some pieces benefit from being next to certain terrain types (wood vs plains) or in line with other units, etc. Some of these bonuses can give you extra resources, but often these bonuses go towards the amount of soldiers you will accumulate for the combat phase, if there is a combat phase. One huge complaint I have is the fact that while pieces don’t drop like in Tetris, there is a bit of a time pressure as the pieces will automatically place if you hold it in position for too long. And there isn’t an “undo” button to get rid of any misplacements.
Combat in Drop Duchy is not great. It uses a rock, paper, scissors type system where one unit type can dominate one other unit type, but is weak to the other one. Except here, the units you gather in gameplay don’t matter as much, as you can use any unit type to reinforce any other unit type.
Just like most other roguelike deck builders since Slay the Spire there is a map between encounters that allows you to choose which of two paths to take. These paths can lead to extra resources, a puzzle scenario, or a combat scenario–along with a few others. Between matches you have the ability to add to the pieces you have by choosing a card to add to your deck. In most roguelike deck builders a lot of the fun comes from the synergies you can get through clever (or lucky) deck building. Drop Duchy doesn’t have that same thrill.
I hate to condemn Drop Duchy, but it’s a game I couldn’t get into at all. I tried. On paper, it sounds amazing. It has even picked up some decent reviews from players on Steam, where it’s sitting at a 89% user score. Some players seemed to love it so much I even went back in to see what I was missing, purely based on their enthusiasm. But Drop Duchy’s mixture of mechanics and genres never fell into place for me.
Drop Duchy is available now on Steam.