Drop Duchy Review: The Tetris-Inspired Roguelite You Need to Play!

Tetris is a game most developers don’t want to mess with.  By most accounts, it’s not only a classic but a minimalist masterpiece of game design.  Even Tetris Effect, its arguably boldest modern iteration, does little more than add an astonishing audiovisual element to elevate a core experience that remains mostly untouched.  You don’t see a lot of games, indie or otherwise, that take elements from Tetris because they’d be drawing a target on their foreheads.  It might be good, but it’s probably not going to be good enough to step out of its inspiration’s shadow.  That is, unless it takes a huge swing by taking Tetris’ core gameplay and using it as a baseline for something far more complex.  This is Drop Duchy.  And let me assure you, it is not a name you’ll soon forget – at least if I have anything to do with it.

To call Drop Duchy’s concept merely an interesting proposition would be to give it no amount of due credit – this is one of the most original genre mash-ups I’ve ever played, and Tetris is only the beginning of it.  It’s hard to even cleanly describe its inspirations because the way they’re interwoven makes it so much more than the sum of those parts, but I’m going to try anyway.  Drop Duchy is Tetris if it had a one-night stand with Slay the Spire, then got pregnant and decided to co-parent the baby with a medieval city builder like Manor Lords.  I’m assuming you now have a full, clear picture of exactly what Drop Duchy is and how it plays, so the review ends here. I’m kidding, please don’t leave me.  

Each run in Drop Duchy sends you through three acts that will have you navigating through branching nodes that consist of resource collection, battles, peaceful tetromino dropping, upgrading, and meta-progressing, you get the gist.  This might sound like every deckbuilder ever, and in a sense, you’re not wrong.  But so many elements about its structure are uniquely tailored to the exact kind of game it aims to be, and I’ll have to elaborate on that – but first, I should probably talk about the core gameplay.

Each playable node in a run of Drop Duchy transports you to a tall rectangular grid, a shape that I’m fairly certain you’ll recognize in this context.  In this grid, you’ll drop your tetrominos into place just like you would in that… other game, but here you’ll be dropping pieces of grassy plains, forests, mountains, rivers, military strongholds, bridges, and trust me, you want me to stop listing there or we’ll be here all day.  And everything has the potential to interact with everything else based on the characteristics of your deck.

Let me rewind a second for clarity – when you pick a playable location, you’ll be told exactly what sort of terrain will be randomly drawn onto the grid. Maybe it’ll be 70% grassy plains and 30% forest, meaning the corresponding proportion of tetrominos you drop will have those qualities. Based on this, you’ll pick which cards in your deck you’ll want to include in the random drawing pool. By default, you’ll only be able to pick two of these, but as runs go on you’ll unlock up to eight different slots to ensure your deck is making the impact it needs to.

Each card in your deck, at least at first, will consist of production pieces like the Farm, which turns each plain within limited range into a field, and military pieces like the Watchtower, which will recruit one archer for each plain in range and three archers for each field in range. I’ll explain why these archers are a thing shortly, just bear with me.

Hopefully, you can already see the beginnings of how synergies might form here, and why making your selections at the beginning of a round is so important. Those synergies are where Drop Duchy’s city-building elements come into focus – you’ll want to place a watchtower near a farm because the more agriculturally developed your land is, presumably the more members of the military can be fed, at least I imagine that’s the idea.

The number and variety of these synergies is massive too - you may have a military card that sends a dozen reinforcements to every other military card as long as it’s nestled along a river, for another example. But that card is literally useless if the terrain you’re dealing with includes no river tiles, so you’ll want to replace it with something actually relevant for that particular round. You might also have a wood clearing lodge that will chop down any forests around it and turn them into plains – place a farm near that too and suddenly tiles will develop from forests to plains to fields, an action that will complete one of the game’s numerous challenges and unlock a slot on the skill tree.

Drop Duchy’s skill tree marries typical roguelite meta-progression with more traditional skill progression to give the player a more active role in what exactly they want to unlock. Nearly everything in Drop Duchy, for better or worse, from major features to different play classes to run-altering technology cards, is unlockable in this skill tree. And while you always have access to the challenges menu that shows you specific things you must do to earn skill points, more often than not, unlocking enough to make progress is just a matter of playing well. It’s a nice change of pace from the typically opaque unlockable system that many roguelikes use – having a direct role in exactly what I upgrade now and being able to see ahead what I can upgrade next helps me to prioritize the features I want.

While these upgrades will help significantly throughout each run, Drop Duchy doesn’t lose sight of the need to actually play Tetris here, either.  Completing a row doesn’t annihilate every tile on it into oblivion since… well, that would be a little dystopian, wouldn’t it?  Instead, it gives you resources from each tile in that row, and bonus resources if you manage to complete two or more rows at once.  Thankfully, unlike a typical city builder, you won’t have dozens of different resources to keep track of here, but the ones you get are important to keep an eye on.  Coins can be spent to rebuild your defenses (in other words, your run’s health bar), while other resources like wood, food, and rock will be necessary to upgrade your cards with features like a larger range and greater military might. 

In yet another refreshing move, Drop Duchy allows you to upgrade your cards any time you want, outside of battle at least, as long as you have the resources to do so.  It took me a while to truly internalize this, since I’m so used to a deckbuilder forcing me into specialized upgrade nodes before I’m allowed to do any such thing.  So don’t forget to periodically upgrade your cards before you head into each new battle, since the game won’t remind you to do so.

I know I keep talking about battles in Drop Duchy without saying anything about how those work and why they matter, so let’s talk about it.  There are two types of playable nodes in Drop Duchy – the peaceful ones and the hostile ones.  Peaceful nodes are more focused on Tetris itself, with the emphasis on collecting resources.  You’ll want to complete as many rows as possible in a peaceful node, but also take care to drop your farms, wood-clearing lodges, and so on in a way that gets you the most resources possible.  You’ll even want to consider the aforementioned technology cards, which more or less work like artifacts in Slay the Spire do, altering your run by allowing completed rows to earn extra bonuses, giving an extra card to choose from after completing each battle, and a huge variety of other passive boosts.

Battle nodes are far more focused on military might.  You’ll want to do whatever you can here to bolster your defenses, and that will mean not pulling a single punch by making sure you’re not only placing the right types of buildings in the right places to get them working at maximum efficiency, but also placing enemy buildings that get drawn in spots that do the least damage possible to you.  Enemy tetrominos are tricksy like that because they have identical characteristics to many of yours - some might get stronger if placed near plains or fields, and others might get stronger if another military building is adjacent or even in the same row as them.  Once a round is complete because you either ran out of pieces or built above the top of the grid, it’s time for battle.  

Every battle unfolds in rock-paper-scissors format, since there are three different types of military units – light units shown with the sword icon, heavy units shown with the axe icon, and archer units shown with the arrow icon.  Archers are more efficient at taking out heavies, heavies more efficient at taking out lights, you get the idea.  You can also combine units depending on the number of each that you have – combining 10 archers with 15 heavy units will result in the lower number of units being converted, and getting 25 heavy units in total.  Battles will then consist of drawing lines between your units and enemy units in whatever way most efficiently destroys their reinforcements while taking advantage of the rock-paper-scissors format.

It might sound to some like there’s a lot going on in Drop Duchy, and there truly is, but it’s presented in a way that only scales up in complexity as you start to harness its basics.  The user interface is blissfully easy to digest, with necessary information on each unit simple to pull up with the hover of a mouse or flick of an analog stick.  Battle sequences are never time-limited and always have a sheet of rules readily visible on the left of the screen, so the game takes great care to ensure you’re never struggling to understand its intricacies.

Any issues I have with Drop Duchy are, generally, nitpicks.  There are times when I would accidentally place a piece because I pressed the wrong button, and an ‘undo’ feature would be great for situations like that.  I also found that your first few runs can hit sort of a ‘catch-22’ of game design – on one hand, they are simple to learn because not much has been unlocked.  On the other hand, because not much has been unlocked, your pool of available strategies feels exceptionally limited, and the difficulty can feel too driven by randomness.

Thankfully, Drop Duchy allows you to select the difficulty of each run, with Easy and Normal being unlocked by default, and higher difficulty levels being available once you’ve shown you’re capable of handling them.  I would strongly encourage anybody put off by the demanding nature of “Normal” difficulty to play a couple of runs on Easy mode – not only is it a great way to grasp the mechanics, but it facilitates your journey up the skill tree a little more quickly, thus allowing higher difficulty runs to feel more in your control.

While Drop Duchy’s incredible gameplay is the meat and potatoes of this experience, its presentation also does a commendable job of adding to its charm while keeping the interface clean. 

I really liked the look of each unit and the way tiles would merge together on the grid as they fell, creating lakes out of rivers and mountains out of rock formations.  The music is also nice, even if not particularly memorable.  The game runs great on the Steam Deck too, and that was how I chose to play it for much of my time.  If anything, while the controller support is quite good, I’d recommend rebinding the button that drops tetrominos to one that you’re less likely to accidentally hit, at least until an ‘Undo’ button hopefully gets added.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, Drop Duchy is a fantastic game with lots of interesting content.  It’s shamelessly addictive, incredibly well-designed, and has so many layers of hidden depth begging to be uncovered as you move your way up the skill tree. 

Even though I spent most of this review talking about the game’s mechanics, I didn’t get much further than the very basics of the gameplay, not even beginning to cover the elaborate boss battles, the two other classes with totally different decks, or unlockable mechanics like mercenaries for hire.  But I’ve already talked your head off enough – the point is, unless you are deathly allergic to roguelites, strategy games, or puzzles, Drop Duchy is a game you’d be well-served to pay attention to.  It’s a stunningly original title, and to my own surprise, one of the best indies of 2025 so far.  I know it’s already been a fantastic year for games, but don’t let this one fly under your radar.

ESSENTIAL