Drop Duchy

Play it on: Windows PCs (Steam Deck YMMV)
Current goal: Protect my kingdom

In some ways it feels like the makers of Drop Duchy took a bunch of genre mechanics, dropped them into a blender, and then flung the resulting concoction against the wall to see what stuck. It’s a deckbuilding roguelike puzzle strategy game that mashes a minimalist city builder into the mold of Tetris. Tiles fall and you have to arrange them inside of a grid. Get a full line and instead of clearing away it will transform into part of a map, granting you resources from the corresponding terrain that appears. Cards, meanwhile, are placed to create buildings or to wage war against enemy units that eventually appear.

It’s both kind of bonkers and surprisingly clever. Time is not really of the essence. Drop Duchy is a pretty chill game from what I’ve played so far. But the formula feels like a neat spin on tile-placing city builders like Dorfromantik. I wish it leaned a bit more into the frenetic urgency and planning of actual Tetris, but for now I’m enjoying myself enough to see if more playthroughs end up yielding deeper strategic tradeoffs in other parts of the game. — Ethan Gach