Drop Duchy

[Maryokutai]

I've been playing this on the side since it came out on Switch, as it's a really good handheld title. It's out on everything though, IIRC on PC since last year. Oddly very little talk online even though it ticks all the boxes for a hit. I don't know if it's the lack of a mascot and it having a rather 'faceless' presentation, or just multiple unlucky release timings.

 

In any case, this is a bit of a mix between various games and genres, like Tetris and Carcassone put into the roguelite corset, but in combination plays like none of them. Explaining this will be a bit boring, but it generally revolves around building a landscape on a playing field by putting Tetromino-shaped blocks on it. The blocks themselves fulfil certain functions: plains, forests etc. generate produce like wheat and wood, others help increase said production (a farm for example), while the third group, military units, bolster your troops in case you land on a field with an enemy. Unlike Tetris the blocks don't fall automtically (at least up until the higher difficulties), but reaping your rewards does require completing a row. The Carcassone element comes into play because it's generally advisable to logically combine blocks of the same type by building a forest, a mountain range or a river, as a lot of production and military facilities work with multiplyers linked to large biomes. The roguelite part of it, meanwhile, is that it features three areas you have to go through and your 'deck' of cards/blocks grows with every stage you beat – even though, to me, it feels more like a classic arcade game than a modern roguelike. Think of a shoot'em up, but instead of shooting enemies you lay out the land and instead of powering up your weapons you unlock new lands. You do unlock some permanent upgrades by fulfilling certain conditions though.

 

I realise this probably sounds very unexciting but it's quite a fun game. There's a lot of depth to it, especially after unlocking secondary factions. The first one, the eponymous Duchy, is a relatively straightforward agricultural deck which is designed around harvesting large fields and interlocking them with military outposts that generate units based on the fields surrounding it, for example. But every other deck has its own unique gimmick they bring to the table: the Order is a religiously-themed, crusading faction that benefits from building and using 'faith' as a currency, the North cannot combine miltary units during its combat phase but can pillage production units for larger benefits, while the Tribe is designed around strategic runestone placement, so that it's central stone momunemt can harness the produce of as large an area as possible. There's also a truckload of additional cards/blocks you can unlock, which are independent from the factions, and add their own little twist on things ('nobles', for example, are very powerful but can't be rotated). But if you don't like some of these, you can banish them, effectively removing them from playthroughs. Combat is a rock-paper-scissors affair, so carefully ordering your units to attack can lead to victories vs. numerical advantages, as seen in the little screenshot below (I won a 162 vs. 180 with 1 unit left).

 

There's a ton of stuff to do here, too. After about 20 hours I'm still not done unlocking all the aforementioned cards, but there are multiple difficulty settings, a trial mode, an endless mode etc. It takes a while to click, because it really showers you in information early on, but when it does it's genuinely good fun. Reading through dwarf's Titanium Court topic, this basically seems like the more approachable little cousin of that game.