Drop Duchy

Drop Duchy feels like Tetris blended with a board game. You must be strategic with your placement — just clearing lines won’t be enough to ensure your victory!

Except in this case, too much is gained. Tetris is a game of removal, of emptying a space - not filling it. The explicit goal is to have as empty a field as possible. Some deckbuilders do mimic this philosophy. Think of the way Slay The Spire encourages removing cards from your deck, paring things back, streamlining your loadout until you are flicking out the same five cards on hypereffective repe...

Drop Duchy is a fantastic addition to the deck-building genre, with a Tetris hybridisation that works slickly with all the other systems in the game. If you like relaxing but challenging games where you look at the clock and it’s suddenly 2am, Drop Duchy should definitely be on your radar. I’m looking forward to seeing what this team does next.

But when you consider the asking price and the fun of the game, that slightness works in its favor. Maybe you don’t have a couple of hours to make serious progress on the big RPGs that are out right now. Maybe what you have is 30 minutes to play some Tetris and also build yourself a merry little kingdom. And Drop Duchy is positioned perfectly for that. Lean in, enjoy some dropping and some managem...

Considering just how fundamental Tetris is to gaming history, it’s perhaps a little surprising that it isn’t featured more often in the merry-go-round of genre mashups that we so often see. Drop Duchy takes those iconic tetrominos and transforms them into land tiles, blending the block-dropping puzzle with deck building, roguelite progression and a theme that would feel fitting for a physical boar...

Making a hybrid roguelike with twists on classic genres and mechanics is rather like hosting a party. There are going to be genres I’ve never met in attendance, gameplay mechanic strangers I only know through mutual genre friends, and if the party isn’t fun from the start, then I’m prone to wandering off to do something else (probably finding the household pet and introverting at it). But much lik...