Drop Duchy

Drop Duchy is a roguelike deckbuilding game about building a kingdom out of Tetris tiles. Unlike standard Tetris, you’re not scoring points: you’re using the map to gather resources and build an army that can defeat the computer’s army. The gameplay is mainly turn-based and requires strategy instead of speed; this unusual mash-up earned Drop Duchy a nomination for Best Strategy Game in the 3rd Thinky Awards.

Like Tetris, different geometric pieces fall from the top of the board one at a time, and you must move and rotate them to fill the board efficiently. The pieces don’t fall in real time though — you can take your time thinking about where to put them. (They will descend automatically about once a minute, but this is more of a nudge than an actual limitation.) There's also a hold space for storing temporarily inconvenient pieces. Some pieces are terrain, with textures like forest, mountain, or meadow. When you fill in an entire row, you get resources like wood and grain based on the terrain in that row, but unlike Tetris, the row doesn’t vanish.

The objective is to build an army and defeat a computer-based opponent, who is assembling an army at the same time on the same map, through your own pool of Tetris pieces. In addition to terrain, some pieces are buildings that collect resources or build army units depending on the terrain and buildings around them. Some of these army units belong to you, but others belong to your opponent. So the goal is to place buildings to maximize your army and resources while minimizing those of your opponent.

Once you finish filling in the map, combat takes place. This involves selecting all the military buildings one at a time and setting the order they will encounter each other. Each building has a garrison of one of three types of units with rock-paper-scissors balance. When two friendly garrisons meet, they add their values together, and the type changes to the type of the larger garrison. When two enemy garrisons meet, the larger garrison wins but subtracts the value of the smaller garrison (subtracting a smaller amount if it’s strong against that type of unit). By strategizing correctly, you can win even if your army is smaller than your opponent’s.

After finishing each level, you can draft a new building to add to your deck. You choose which of your own buildings to use in a given level, but the terrain and enemy buildings are determined by the level. You can also spend your resources to upgrade buildings.

As you play, you also unlock a variety of metaprogression elements, including an extensive tech tree, new factions to play, and quests that grant you bonuses like extra health. Unusually, you can unlock new things during a run, not just between runs.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz.