Drop Duchy review: Building an empire piece by piece

Ah, roguelite deckbuilders. They come in all flavors and forms, often borrowing some elements from each other or completely unrelated games, leading to descriptions such as “This game is like the baby of Slay the Spire, Dorfromantik, Balatro, and Tetris all at once.” That’s my actual attempt at summarizing all the prominent influences visible in Drop Duchy, by the way. 

Sleepy Mill Studio’s take on this popular genre is a clever one. You basically play Tetris with the usual blocks. But instead of the blocks simply being of different colors, they represent different terrain, such as plains, woods, and rivers, and instead of vanishing once you fill a row, you gain resources depending on what kind of land you used to complete it with. Like in a strategy game, you gather food, wood, stone, and gold in this way.

Some pieces are special, though. They don’t represent terrain — they are buildings. While the pool of terrain that’s available depends on the area you’re currently visiting, the buildings that’ll come up stem from your hand. That’s the deckbuilding aspect. You can bring farms to till plains and upgrade them to fields, netting you additional food, or add a bridge to your river network, gaining gold for each connected river tile, and so on.

You can see where this is going: Placing your buildings and tiles in the best possible order is paramount to gathering resources. Naturally, there are challenges and obstacles to overcome. First, there is chance: You don’t decide the order tiles come down in. There is one reserve slot allowing you to keep a tile for later, but that’s it. For the rest, you build with what you’re dealt. Second, there are hostile tiles, which will force you to adapt your plans on the fly. You don’t want an enemy wooden fortress to come down next to your woods, because it would provide your foe with additional soldiers.

As the game progresses, your own cards and the enemy’s become more complex, but ramp up in power. As is tradition for roguelite deckbuilders, you pick up new cards as you advance on the overworld map, which has various paths and hubs. That’s also where you use the resources you gather. You can upgrade your cards for better effects, trade resources, or expand your hand — this will allow you to bring more buildings into an encounter and is essential for victory. There are also technology cards that provide passive bonuses.

It’s a familiar gameplay loop, then. You progress through nodes and build a deck you feel secure with. What’s interesting about Drop Duchy is the potential lack of combat throughout a run. Sure, sometimes all the available paths will have enemy tiles, but sometimes you can decide to simply choose an area for peaceful building and resource gathering. However, each time you go into an area like that, the boss at the end of the act grows stronger. It’s an intriguing decision to make — will the extra resources give you the necessary power spike to offset the one the boss gets? Or is it better to deal with a couple of enemy tiles while gathering strength?

Which brings us to combat. There is no constant back and forth between attacks and defense in this game. You don’t spend energy or mana to play cards. You place tiles in the building area until there are no more tiles left in the pool or until a tile sticks out of the building area — usually due to it being full. This also means that you can deliberately end encounters early with the way you stack your tiles, at the cost of not maximizing your resource gain. Combat is resolved afterwards. Buildings often come with garrisons – especially hostile buildings – that provide them a base number of troops, but gain additional soldiers through tile effects and adjacency bonuses and such. 

A river castle, for example, needs to be connected to a certain amount of river riles and then gains troops for each tile that’s part of the network. A barracks generates soldiers depending on the gold you produce in an encounter, and so forth. There are tons of playstyles on offer. But enemy tiles have similar effects, and so you both generate soldiers throughout the building phase.

At the end of the encounter, you get to select your troops and make a route for them through the enemy territory, deciding where to attack when. This is crucial, because combat functions like a match of rock, paper, scissors: Archers beat heavy troops. Heavy troops beat light troops. Light troops beat archers. You can overwhelm heavy troops with light troops, but you’ll need a significant advantage in numbers. If you win, you earn additional gold for all your surviving soldiers, if you lose the number of surviving enemies will be subtracted from your overall HP.

Similar to the building phase, the combat has a lot of hidden depth to it. For example, when you stack two of your unit groups together, they merge into the unit type of the larger group, allowing you to grow that one substantially. What need is there for archers if the enemy only has light troops, for example? So if you have a couple of archers, you send them into your heavy troops before pushing the enemy. It gets more complex than that, of course. Sometimes you’ll want to deliberately send your units into a disadvantageous battle to reduce their numbers enough to allow you to stack them in a favorable manner before storming a different enemy position.

Both the building and tactical combat aspects are very satisfying. There is some RNG that can screw you, but very often it’s your brain that ruins your plans. As you play, you unlock more and more cards in the technology tree and even get access to additional factions, which come with their own set of buildings and strengths. The Duchy, for example, relies a lot on farming and the typical feudal-type buildings to generate units. The Republic, on the other hand, is built on gold, and so on. The game is very clear about your current challenges and quests to unlock stuff, so you’ll always have a goal in front of you — aside from beating Act 3, of course.

Which brings me to the boss fights. Boss maps all revolve around a special mechanic. The Wall in Act 1 restricts your building space, so you must be compact and careful as you slowly push it up. The Fortress in Act 2 gains troops whenever you place a building along certain lines on the map, which is tough. This is the boss I personally found the hardest to crack, as it’s incredibly punishing. Act 3, the Dungeon, functions kind of similar, but interacts with terrain tiles instead, changes its ‘punishment lines’ with every new tile, and requires you to earn gold to delay tiles hostile to you being thrown into the mix.

Mechanically, all three bosses are intriguing challenges and it feels genuinely great to outwit them. What I personally dislike is that boss encounters completely disregard the rock, paper, scissor system for combat. Instead of distinct troop types, they field a generalist unit that can trade blows equally with all three of your troop types, making it a pure numbers game.

This feels a bit counterintuitive to how the rest of the game is set up, though I can certainly see why the devs decided to do things that way — it’s hard enough to generate enough troops as it is thanks to the special boss mechanics, so having to generate specific types of troops would probably be too much. Ultimately, it simply means that the boss fights are purely won or lost in the building phase. There is no room to change your fate with combat tactics.

Similar to Balatro, your cards earn seals that show off the highest difficulty level you cleared the game at while using them, and in addition to higher difficulties you can throw in modifiers to up the challenge — starting off with a single HP or being prevented from stashing enemy tiles in the reserve spot, for instance. Suffice to say, Drop Duchy offers tons of replayability and variety.

Aside from my gripe with the boss fights – for which I have no better solution, mind you – I really don’t have anything bad to say about Drop Duchy. 

Drop Duchy brings together city-building, tactical combat, and Tetris under a roguelite mantle and fits it together so neatly that you can’t see any seams. It’s one of those perfectly polished little gems that know what they want to be and do.

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