Drop Duchy Demo Preview – A Tough Mixture of Genres
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Sleepy Mill Studio has released a free demo of their upcoming game, Drop Duchy. A mashup of genres, this debut game promises to offer a unique, challenging experience. We’ve spent many rounds building our town up, collecting resources, and fighting the enemy, and have our impressions available now.
Drop Pieces, Collect Cards, Start Fresh
Part Tetris clone, part deckbuilding game, plus the Rogue-lite element of starting fresh each playthrough, describes Drop Duchy at a surface level. There are a lot of moving parts and pieces to consider, and as with either of the main genres the game finds itself in, a bit of luck can be required to get you out of a jam. When things are working well, you can feel like a genius as you beef up your defenses while demolishing the CPU-controlled opponent. When things aren’t going so well, you can’t help but laugh in despair as you flail in a vain attempt at surviving the wall that greets you at the end of the board.
So, for starters, you begin each run with a deck of cards, which dictates what kinds of tetromino-style pieces will be given to you in combat and/or collecting stages. You begin on a board game-like, top-down overview of your kingdom. There are several spots on the map that you can travel to, and each time you move up one level, you may encounter a branching path. Some of these paths are peaceful, or simply a break to collect or trade kingdom resources, while others involve combat against the opposing, CPU-controlled kingdom. Occasionally, the branching path forces you to choose to attack the enemy, or collect resources in a regular puzzle level, with no hostile forces to counteract, but at the cost of the boss waiting for you at the end of the level becoming more powerful. There is a decent amount of strategy to consider even in this simpler-looking portion of the game.
Strategic Placement Wins
Once you do land on a puzzle spot, the core of Drop Duchy begins. You’re given a deck of random tiles, which must be placed strategically as they slowly fall down the battlefield. What’s interesting here is that not only do you get to place your own units, but also those of the enemy’s. In fact, one valid strategy involves the Tetris-like aspect: you can use the reserve spot to simply hang on to an enemy unit. If you manage to place all the other tiles, then that reserve piece is never used. Another change for this part of Drop Duchy is that when a row of tiles is complete, rather than that row disappearing, you are awarded resources for each tile type, which can be used later to upgrade cards or trade at certain spots in the overworld.
As far as piece types go, there are a couple of categories. There are production units, which generate resources for your kingdom, as well as military units, which produce soldiers used to fight. For instance, one building produces 2-3 fighting units for each plains tile it is placed next to. These rules take effect whenever a tile is placed within range of that building, not only when the building is placed down. Therein lies some of the strategy: you can place a unit-generating building near some fields now, and generate some soldiers. But then, a few moves later, you can drop another unit which converts nearby tiles into plains, and the converted plains will generate additional soldiers because of the rules set on that military building you placed down earlier.
Adding further to the strategy in Drop Duchy, each card that generates these pieces can be upgraded, usually at a steep cost to your resources. This generates more units or resources per connected environmental tile, or some other boon to your town. Some passive cards can also be drawn, which have effects such as converting your first forest piece into another type of tile automatically, which can help if you’re focusing on building up a larger army.
Quite a Steep Learning Curve
Drop Duchy is a TOUGH game. Its mixture of strategy and luck remind me of another ruthlessly tough game, Tharsis. If you’re playing on Normal difficulty, expect to lose, and lose a LOT on the first playthroughs. Playing on Easy mode is not only recommended, it may be required for you to learn how the game’s many systems work together to challenge you. This may frustrate some, but considering the game bills itself as a strategy game, most players will likely be in it for the long haul as strategies get devised the longer one plays. Most runs are also short, as in half an hour or less, so you can very quickly test out new methods of collecting resources or see if that new card you discovered helps. Don’t expect the game to pull any punches, however – even a victory on Easy mode is not guaranteed. There is already talk on the Steam Discussions forum for Drop Duchy from Sleepy Mill Studio about needing to tweak the difficulty.
Drop Duchy has a unique mixture of genres going on here, and a difficulty curve to match. Starting on Easy difficulty is recommended, unless you’re a glutton for punishment or are otherwise a strategy expert. Despite this, it does feel rewarding to figure out a strategy that works against a boss, even if sometimes it feels like luck was simply on your side that round.
While the game isn’t due out until April 2025, anyone interested in checking it out for themselves can download the free demo, available on Steam now. Based on the minimum specs, it should run on any computer built within at least the last decade, so give it a shot if it piques your interest.
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