I’ll admit it: I’m a bit of a Tetris fiend. As a puzzle game enthusiast, I can’t get enough of the classic block-dropping series. I still regularly play Tetris 99 to this day. I got a kick out of seeing its history retold in Digital Eclipse’s Tetris Forever. I even had a period where I got into the Apple Arcade exclusive Tetris Beat. Most of all, I love seeing indie developers T-spin the format on its head in ways that The Tetris Company never would dare to.
That’s exactly what I got when I tried a new demo for Drop Duchy, an upcoming puzzle roguelite that takes Tetris in a new direction. While I’m dropping pieces and filling lines as you’d expect, that’s only one small piece of the puzzle. How many Tetris variants have you building a serene countryside, harvesting crops, and going to war with other troops — all within a well? Even if it might take players some time to wrap their head around, Drop Duchy is shaping up to be the kind of oddball hidden gem puzzle fans should have on their radar.
While Tetris is the central inspiration here, Drop Duchy takes some immediate notes from a much different game: Slay the Spire. When I start a round, I have to navigate a mission select board full of puzzle scenarios, shops, and opportunities to add cards to my hand. Yes, surprise, Drop Duchy is a deckbuilder too. The idea is that players amass a collection of buildings, military units, and passive effects that change what happens once they start dropping pieces. Before actually jumping into a well, I have to select my card loadout and even unlock more slots with gathered resources.
Once that’s set, the Tetris hook kicks in. I have to manage a well by placing falling pieces. Some of them are tetromino land pieces, decorated with forest and plain tiles. I can quick-drop pieces into place or hold one for later, just as I can in Tetris. That’s all easy enough to understand, but the mechanical similarities mostly end there. My goal isn’t to clear lines; it’s to gather resources through optimal tile placement. My equipped buildings are shuffled into my queue between land pieces, and I need to carefully figure out where to place them to harvest as many crops as I can. If a building gives me wood per adjacent forest tiles, it’s in my best interest to create a dense forest patch and leave space to drop a building. Connecting a lien of tiles doesn’t wipe it off the board; it gives me bonus resources instead.
Other boards are based around battles. In addition to those pieces, both my and my enemies’ army units drop into a well. I need to carefully place mine in a way that takes advantage of their bonuses, which boosts how many troops I have. Conversely, I also need to place my opponent’s troops and try to avoid triggering their own bonuses. Once everything is in place, I resolve a battle with a quick strategy minigame. I create one single battle path, connecting all troops on the board together in a way that will end well for me. For instance, I could move one batch of troops to another, form a bigger army, move that to an enemy’s troops, wipe them out, and send my surviving troops to another battle from there. Drop Duchy uses a Fire Emblem-style weapon triangle, so I need to make sure I’m pitting my archers or swordsmen against the classes they’re strong against.
If this all sounds a little hard to grasp, it is. It took me a few tries to complete a successful demo run, which had me taking on a few puzzles before taking on a boss fight. There’s a lot of brain rewiring that needs to happen if you’re used to the rules of Tetris. For instance, block-dropping isn’t exactly about creating a perfect well. It’s more of a city-building strategy game similar to Dorfromantik. Sensible tile placement is the name of the game, but that sometimes requires me to suppress my Tetris instincts and leave unsightly gaps in my well.
Battling has a learning curve, too, as I couldn’t wrap my head around the system in my first attempts. There’s just a lot to juggle, from two opposing armies to the land around them. Once I found my groove, though, I could appreciate the simple math puzzle at the heart of combat. It’s simply a matter of making sure your troops outnumber another’s and creating a path that builds on that momentum.
Maybe it’s just a touch too clever. Playing it brought me back to Loot River, another neat indie that turned Tetris into a roguelike. That game’s tetromino hook wound up feeling more like a gimmick stuffed into a hybrid-genre game than a robust puzzler. Drop Duchy feels more successful than that so far, though I’ll have to see how much depth there is to it. The demo is only a small teaser with a few cards and scenarios to mess around with.
I’m most certainly intrigued, though. Drop Duchy scratches a Tetris, roguelike, strategy, and minimalist city-builder itch in one go, all genres I dig on their own. I’m down for any game that can kill four rows with one long block.