Fans of city builders and Tetris are sure to find something to enjoy in Drop Duchy, a game that presents a unique kind of puzzle under the guise of a medieval city builder, delivering an immersive and intellectually stimulating game that can be picked up and dropped in short bursts, requiring very little commitment or time to enjoy. While most puzzle games stick to well-worn territory, Drop Duchy leans confidently into its hybrid identity, standing out by marrying two vastly different genres into one smart and efficient package.
If the comparison of “city builders and Tetris” caught your interest, you are most certainly looking at the right game. You might also be a little confused by what that means, so I’ll explain. It’s a pretty unique concept, and one that I get more enjoyment out of than I thought I would. The game doesn’t just combine these elements superficially. It builds a mechanical foundation that makes both aspects essential. You’re not just solving a puzzle for the sake of a score. You’re building something, optimizing systems, managing resources, and even planning for combat, all on a grid.
Drop Duchy is mainly built around the block-dropping puzzle mechanics that were introduced in Tetris. Each turn, you are given the familiar shaped blocks of Tetris fame, including the L-shaped, the long lines, the Z, and even the beloved 2×2 square. You have to place them within a limited space, moving them downwards along a grid until they rest against something. Instead of just plain colors, these shapes represent landmasses like plains, rivers, mountains, and sometimes even towns, hunting lodges, or various other military and production buildings.
Instead of a line being cleared when you fill it from side to side with a color, you instead “explore” that line and gain materials depending on how you filled that line. A line filled with forest tiles will provide you with a bundle of wood per tile, plains will give you food, and so on. You can explore tiles completed with different kinds of land, so a line made of forests and plains still counts. The various buildings I mentioned before are placed to gain bonuses from the tiles around them, with certain buildings getting resource or manpower bonuses from being surrounded by forest tiles.
That’s right, I said manpower. Drop Duchy’s puzzle does not simply end when you reach the top of the grid. Some levels involve a combat component as well. Particularly on these levels, you will occasionally be handed tiles that provide garrisons for your enemy. These tiles must be placed and have their own bonuses for interaction with the placement of other tiles, challenging you to try and play a sort of anti-game where you try to give the enemy as few buffs as possible. After all the tiles are placed, you must then order your troops to attack the enemy. This is a numbers game of merge and subtraction where you try to build the biggest army possible while losing as little as possible to ultimately clear the board of enemies and have troops left over. Leftover troops are paid to you in gold, and there is a simple rock-paper-scissors counter system in unit types that makes particular units stronger against others.
You progress this way across a campaign map, going from level to level and gathering resources as you go to upgrade your deck of Tetris cards to make encounters easier. Each run has a boss at the end, which has a unique take on the Tetris-style mechanics that change how you play and provide a cool little challenge.
The campaigns provide challenges to be completed on the side. Doing so unlocks new cards, which will randomly be added to your reward options after each level. It is essentially a Tetris-like Slay the Spire, now that I think about it. Like Slay the Spire, deck-building and replayability are key. Different unlocks mean each run can be tailored to different strategies, and discovering synergies between cards is part of the fun. Sometimes you’ll aim for economic dominance. Other times, you might go heavy into military upgrades. The modularity keeps things feeling fresh.
Honestly, I don’t have too much more to say about the game. The graphics were cute and appealing. The game has great sound design. The simple yet charming and mentally stimulating puzzles keep you engaged for as long as you need them to, making for a game that is easy to pick up at any time and put down when you aren’t feeling it or you have to make a quick run from the computer. The Tetris-like mechanics are thoughtfully designed, giving you all the free time in the world to think about your placement as you move the piece or to slide it into another area once it connects with the floor. The strategic depth is definitely there to challenge players of all skill levels.
Though the game is a puzzle game above all else, with a medieval city-building and war game used as flavoring, I would have liked to see more effort put into the battle side of things. Maybe something as simple as little troop animations would have made this aspect more fun, but it could also have easily become a repetitive feature that took away from the overall experience. The minimalist presentation works in its favor, but I can’t help but imagine how a little extra flourish during combat might have added emotional weight to your victories.
That said, it’s hard not to respect how well Drop Duchy delivers on its core mechanics. Everything feeds back into the central loop. You drop tiles, manage resources, fend off enemies, upgrade your options, and repeat. The pacing is tight. The visuals are warm and approachable. The blend of logic and planning never feels overwhelming.
The Final Word
Whether you’re chasing leaderboard scores, working through the campaign, or just squeezing in a short session during a break, Drop Duchy is right for you. There’s a quiet brilliance to the way it unites so many simple on the surface yet subtly complicated gameplay systems without letting any of them spiral out of control. It is rare for a puzzle game to offer this much substance while remaining this approachable, but Drop Duchy makes it look easy.
Try Hard Guides was provided a PC code for Drop Duchy for this review. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on ourGame Reviewspage! Drop Duchy is available onSteam.
