Tetris is an evergreen concept because it’s an exceptional piece of design. The seven possible Tetrominos are each composed of four pieces and they are made to fit together in a puzzle, and give instant dopamine hits when they are pieced together cohesively: you clear the line. It’s so perfectly readable and conceptually sound, it’s no wonder the Tetris Effect, the concept of our continued visual imagination of game detritus blowing around in our brains long after playing, is named after the most compulsively well-patterned videogame ever made. Change anything and you take certain risks. It will not be as good as Tetris, for one, if you’ve changed anything about how Tetris works. But as a baseline, you still have elements of The Perfectly Designed Game, if you stay close to the formula, which is a formula because it works.

Drop Duchy don’t care. Not about Tetris. Not about nothing. Drop Duchy is its own design, holistically, which uses Tetris only as a jumping off point. Drop Duchy is Tetris, in that it’s a falling block game where you want to fill in usable space in the most particular way you can. But at its core, Drop Duchy is about strategy and like half of the new games that come out, it’s also — brace yourself — a rougelike. A Tetris-strategy-rougelike.

This is war. First stage of the game, the pieces are dropping, and need to be arranged in ways that benefit each other. It’s not just about shapes — there are a few different piece types: production, military, and environment pieces. The logic is boardgame like, except you will (for now) also place the pieces of your computer opponent. So, there are several factors to consider. You want to build full rows of land, because that’s what nets resources and you’ll want to put it by the right production buildings that amplify that count. Meanwhile, you’ll want to place your military bonuses in conjunction with the environmental boosts that they receive from the type and shape of land pieces around them. Then you’ll place the enemy pieces badly so their bonus triggers aren’t engaged.

We move beyond the seven possible Tetris shapes. Not every piece is four pieces. Some are single blocks, others are more unwieldy for the grid, but mostly, it’s Tetris shapes. The design for each environmental piece is very clear but military buildings have a tendency to look practically the same as other buildings when laid down on the board, where they become damn near indistinguishable when piled onto a mess of blocks. You’ll constantly mistake buildings for ones with totally opposite attributes and needs from their surrounding pieces. If in future versions, building types can be made absolutely distinct, it will improve Drop Duchy dramatically.

So the pieces have all fallen and we’re onto the war stage. Which is just selecting types of units generated by your sensible block placements and migrating them to groups of the right type for a game like rock-paper-scissors with the opposing pieces.

We move up a map between battles, until we face off with a boss that carries specialized stipulations for your placements. Along the way, we can do some deckbuilding, as we accumulate production and military pieces, which are suited ideally for the types of environment ahead of us. There is progression tied to leveling up these cards and it makes a simple and mostly agreeable mechanical loop.

Early in a run of Drop Duchy, you pretty much know. You will develop this sense quickly. You’ll know if it’s a promising run or one that won’t pass the first boss very easily. Eventually, you can game your way through with puzzle skill and piece awareness, but also, if you upgrade with the right focus and build around the cards you have, it’s much easier going.

All the parts feel crushed together here. They’re breaking under the weight of their odd genre combinations. The result is a puzzle game where the right formation of blocks is mostly determined by what pieces are around them, more so than well-thought-out layouts of blocks fitting together. Likewise, the strategy of the game is so clearly decided by placement, that this becomes the extent of the strategy — perhaps the action phase needs more progressive gameplay elements, because it feels distinctly disconnected from whatever amount of runs has preceded it, while the block-dropping parts mostly feel determined by the quality of the current run overall.

Drop Duchy is admirable, though, in creating an iron-clad gameplay loop. With three factions and a rougelike progression tree, there’s a lot to uncover, and the more you play, the more you find the working strategies — that you essentially want to build a deck of all-upgraded cards that work specifically well with all the bonuses in your set of cards. It’s compelling and uniquely drawn out of common influences, but it can never be Tetris, because if you change much at all, you’ve broken the most sacred design in all of games. Sometimes maybe it’s worth the risk.

6/10

Reviewed on Steam Deck