Drop Duchy is an inventive mixture of Tetris with deck-building and combat

Giving a really odd and unique blending of genres and game mechanics, Drop Duchy is a wonderful choice for you to pick up and play. Note: key provided for me by their PR team.

Tested on Desktop Linux (Kubuntu 25.04) with the latest Proton 10 Beta, it's been a perfect experience.

On the surface it seems very much like Tetris but it's also a deck-builder, that sprinkles in some basic combat too. At the basic level though, it's all very much about dropping blocks in the right places to build up the board in the best way possible. It can get a little complicated with all the different types of blocks but thankfully the tutorial and early gameplay is pretty great at showing you the ropes.

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The idea here is that you go through an overworld of different nodes, each being a different type of board encounter to fill up with blocks. Some may be combat encounters, other just let you place down blocks to build up your resources to do upgrades and acquire more cards for your deck that form the blocks and eventually it all leads to boss battles.

Unlike say Tetris and other block-dropping games, the idea here is not to fill as little as possible or to remove things from the board. It reverses it by making you fill up the board completely in the way that gives you the biggest advantages in terms of gathering resources and building up your army. As you complete a whole line, the resources across that lined are then added into your totals for the current board mission. Complete multiple lines at a time and get bonuses.

One fun little addition is the reserve block option. At any point you can choose to reverse a specific block, instead of dropping it on the board. You can then swap this reserved block with another, if you feel the next is going to be a better fit. At the end of the round, the piece reserved will be discarded, so it's especially useful for enemy blocks to remove one from the round.

It turns it even into a very miniature city-builder due to the mechanics of dropping specific types of building blocks down, that all work together on the board to build you up. Very clever stuff in how it all comes together with the mixture of mechanics.

The battle system is on the basic side, but it works well with the main block-dropping mechanics here. You want to arrange the board in such a way that you get as many troops as possible across different types, all with their own strengths and weaknesses. Each troop building type gains bonus amount depending on what blocks they're placed next to, or what blocks you build up around them.

However, you're dropping down the enemy blocks to build up the board too. Everything here is about correct placement. It's not particularly punishing either, although it is a challenge. If you fail an encounter, it's not instant game over, since you have an overworld total health bar that you can fill back up as you play more of it to gather resources and currency as needed.

Once you're done and combat begins it's very much a simple game of numbers. You drag around units from point to point, either adding to each-other from your own forces or subtracting from the total based on the number of enemies at the point. Where it gets complicated is how different unit types have strengths and weaknesses, so you need to pay attention to this. Not just that, but when moving your units into a point full of a different type (say Archers and Axemen) they will combine into one type based on which type you have more of, so the order of movement is important too.

Combat isn't always forced either (except the boss battles), since the overworld map lets you often pick boards that don't have combat and let you focus on resources. Double-edged sword though, because avoid the combat encounters will end up making the boss battles more difficult in the end. The boss battles mix things up with their own little mini-game inside the board making them even more of a challenge.

The biggest issue I have with it is the lack of an undo button, I am a repeat miss-clicker, and often I'll end up with pieces where I don't want them. It feels a bit punishing not to have this feature considering how absolutely vital the positioning is, so you have to be incredibly careful or restart the whole board. In a way, you could think it's cheating, but to me I think it's an accessibility / difficulty issue that should have been a feature of the game to give you at the very least 1 single undo.

Overall though it's really interesting to play, with lovely visual design and engaging game mechanics that's worth picking up. I'm terrible at Tetris but somewhat okay at this.