80% Tetris, 20% Civilization And Entirely Engaging
Drop Duchy’s big idea – what would happen if Tetris blocks became territory and buildings? – is so strong that its developers could have made something simple and it would still have drawn attention.
But what makes Drop Duchy admirable is that the developers have taken the idea to its farthest length and buffed it to a sheen. There’s determination to make this the best game it can be.
The Building Blocks Of Civilization
The basics of Drop Duchy will be familiar and simple to pretty much everyone. Blocks fall from the top of the screen in various shapes. There will be a basic human urge to make lines from these blocks. But instead of disappearing, these lines will remain, generating resources according to the terrain on those blocks. Plains and fields make wheat, forests make timber, mountains stone – that sort of thing.
Your bag of blocks also contains buildings. There are two flavours of these: production and military. Production is the easiest to describe. These blocks are always allied to you, and they have effects on the terrain and the resources. A Wood Clearer might flip nearby forests into plains, generating timber as they turn over. A Farm might change the resulting plains into fields. They combo exactly as you’d hope.
These buildings are their own shapes, and have to be slotted into your plans in the same way as terrain. Military buildings, too, can be any number of square, L, S or I shapes.
Military buildings generate troops rather than resources. They can be friend or foe, with rules for how many troops they make. A Rally Point relies on adjacent grass to make warriors, while a Hunting Lodge depends on forests.
If you’ve minimised the number of enemy troops (surrounding those enemy Rally Points with mountains so that they create minimal reserves) and maximised your own, then you are ready for round-end. Once all the blocks have been socketed in the grid, your armies will face-down your enemies’ forces. There’s a combat triangle at play here – axes beat swords, swords beat arrows, arrows beat axes – so you’re sequencing the order of the various skirmishes to your advantage.
Can’t Escape The Roguelikes
The quasi-Tetris games play out in a roguelike fashion. You’re advancing towards a castle, and there are various battles (the Tetris games) and opportunities to spend the resources you’ve gained from completed lines. Little branches in the path give you agency over what happens: you might aim for a depot that generates rock resources, or you might choose to fight a battle that prioritises forest ‘blocks’ over mountains.
Zoom out of Drop Duchy even further and there are three castles to defeat, each in sequence. These castles are bosses with special rules that test your growing deck of buildings. You will likely need a balance of military and production buildings to overcome them, and you will certainly need both for the final fight. And once a run is done, there are persistent benefits to be earned – more biomes, factions, buildings and even entire systems – and unlocking them is dependent on whether you ticked off a few of the game’s challenges.
I can’t underline it more: Drop Duchy is a sprawling beast of a game. The benefit of waiting for a game to come to Xbox is that with the Complete Edition you get all the content and patches. We have played for dozens of hours on PC and not reached the summit of the unlocks – there are that many. On Xbox, we’ve unlocked even fewer. If you vibe with Drop Duchy, you can merrily play for weeks.
A Puzzle Game That’s Not Quite For Everyone
I did vibe with Drop Duchy, but there was always a hand holding me back from truly loving it, from feeling that compelling itch to play it all the time. It’s firmly in my ‘games to replay’ playlist on the Xbox, but it’s not super-high on that list.
A lot of what’s good about Drop Duchy – Complete Edition comes from Tetris, of course. The primal enjoyment of socketing bricks perfectly together, and unleashing a wave of resources when you get four lines in a row, is present here. Tetris fans might be a little dismayed that the blocks never, ever fall fast (there’s a good reason for that – more on that later) and that lines don’t disappear, but it’s all in service of the wider game.
The supporting game is admirable too. Whenever I am compelled to play, it’s down to completing challenges to gain upgrades. There will be a new faction or system I want to explore, and I can feel secure in the knowledge that I will gain some form of reward for my efforts. If every game had this number of rewards, we’d only play about five games a year.
I’m a big fan of the different strategies, too. There’s an absolute multitude of ways to win. You can double-down on any number of angles: going all-in on military, emphasising rivers, doubling-down on gold. I’ve just finished a run where my technologies (perks you can earn from rewards, basically) and my buildings would prioritise ‘terraforming’ tiles, constantly switching them from one terrain to another. Watching a tile flip over four or five times has its own brand of satisfaction.
Bearing The Cognitive Load
What tugs it all back down for me is comprehension of what is going on in the Tetris games. When you factor in your production and military buildings – often with mechanics in tiny, tiny text – the opponent’s military, all of the passive effects, the constellations that can be called on per match, the boss’s mechanics and so many more (oh yes, the combat triangle) the result is analysis paralysis. 99% of the games I have lost is because I have misunderstood or forgotten about a mechanic or technology that ended up disrupting my plans. An entire run crumbles down around me because I have forgotten that a buried enemy military unit gets buffed by the mountain I just slotted into the top of the grid.
I think the makers of Drop Duchy know this. The last time I played on PC, I don’t think the blocks dropped as slowly as they do here on Xbox. There is an attempt to accommodate the player’s thought processes, which is nice. There are helpful bits and pieces of UI to make things easier too, such as indicators for ‘aligned to’ and ‘in range of’. But there’s no solution, at least that I could find, for reminding myself of the effects of enemy military buildings. And the compounding effect is awkwardness.
Worth The Withered Waves Of Content
The slight unwieldiness is what holds Drop Duchy from greatness. Because there is a point – a distant, double-digit-hours point – where knowledge and understanding combine to make it less of an issue. First, you have to weather waves of new unlocks which only complicate things further.
As unwelcome as Drop Duchy can be in its mid-game, I have no hesitation in saying that it’s worth it. Tetris is a pretty awesome foundation to build on, and Drop Duchy – Complete Edition stacks resource gathering, roguelike runs and simple strategy on top. The foundations hold, creating a strategy-puzzle mish-mash that we love to drop into. It has a decent chance of being somewhere that you visit for weeks and weeks.
Important Links
Drop Duchy Is A Day One Game Pass Gem You Shouldn’t Ignore – https://www.thexboxhub.com/drop-duchy-is-a-day-one-game-pass-gem-you-shouldnt-ignore/
Download from the Xbox Store, using Game Pass if you like – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/drop-duchy-complete-edition/9nxvptb0fxsz
