tetris but also feudalism. it is a very russian game in this way. would be cool if there was an incentive for t-spins to appeal to very lonely people such as myself.

I want to be really clear, I do love what this game is presenting as its loop. However, I find the loop after several hours to be extremely shallow. You are met with sheer cliffs of difficulty spikes between Acts, for which there is zero means for you to effectively "outsmart" your way into a win. It's planned failure to force you to return to the main menu so you can start again with a/several boosted cards at your fingertips that you unlocked naturally without even thinking about it simply for the fact that you were following what the facility says you should already be doing to maximize its effectiveness. I would hazard to say that if you weren't trying to do that every time regardless, you'd just be jeopardizing your entire run due to the RNG potential of just being served a dearth of pieces that simply won't mesh with what you need to build to win the fight on that map, and all for a silly bonus when you inevitably have to restart. I enjoy Tetris a lot. I tend to feel clever when I manage to make the lines, and the strategy behind laying things in the order you need to max them out in this game is fun. But I *hate* that I'm told to go back and do it all again just because you want to force me to pad my time out content-wise by creating artificially scaled walls. I will continue to play this game, but honestly it's largely because it allows me to do so between calls from work easily. Without changes, it's just not respectful of time though, so I don't think it's worth it if you're coming into this expecting to be able to outsmart the rogueliteification. You won't. It's just a more fancy Tetris with a mini-game at the end. So yes, I do recommend this game... but at the same time, I don't.

it's a shame I can't recommend this currently because I really enjoy this game conceptually. For those that are familiar with classic Tetris, you're likely familiar with the term "floods" and "droughts," these being the names coined for situations where you get the same piece back to back to back to back, etc. or not receiving a particular piece or pieces for several drops. As more tetris games were released, randomizers were designed, ironically enough to make the game less random, so floods and droughts were either eliminated or reduced in prevalence. With that in mind this game has sort of created a cursed game design problem for itself... You can't just take a tetris randomizer algorithm and drop it into this game because of the following considerations

• You have more than just 4 tile tetriminos
• Different terrain piece pools
• Building pieces

This is only exagerated by the fact that we're not playing tetris here, you aren't clearing lines and drawing infinite tiles. You have a set pool of ~20 to 30 tiles. So while you might be getting all the correct shapes you're getting a flood of forest tiles and a drought of building tiles. Or you're getting the terrain/building tiles, but they're just not the right shape. Now theres a really simple bandaid fix to this problem, that honestly doesn't solve this issue, but it would theoretically help, and that's to just add a second reserve slot. But honestly that's just a boring solution. Heres my pitch... its a rougelike right? Let the player use randomizer biases as part of their build. Create some system that allows the player to bias terrain tiles or building tiles, etc. to fit the needs of their build. Allow the player to draft technology cards or technology adjacent cards that change how the pool is shuffled "when a river card is queued a building is queued after it." "when an enemy military tile is queued, queue one of your own military tiles.

It is a decent game with extremely poor game design and systems. No mouse controls means that you have to learn key bindings and cannot play with mouse. Those same key bindings cannot be displayed on the play screen meaning that you have to pause, look at a sub menu, pause again. It is very bad game design. Locking cards behind achievements feels really terrible to play. It like the worst F2P model. Most of the time you end starting a game and playing just for some silly quest that means you cannot even fight against the first area boss. Locked progression feels really bad to play. Getting new terrain while unlocking cards just doesn't feel good as a player. Having the same three bosses for the areas every single game gets boring and repetitive very quickly. Most of the cards are very confusing and hard to understand as a player especially as you unlock more cards because the enemy gets more cards as you the player does. I find it really bad that you can only play around 15% of a game when you buy it and have to finish arbitriary quests to even experience the majority of the game. Basicly this is bad game design by making the game feel more expansive by locking content behind achievements (aka quests). Again, this has all the scumbag moves of a F2P game but requires you to do a bunch of busy works tasks to enjoy the game instead of spending extra money. Overall a very poor player experience.

Drop Duchy isn't that bad, it just suffers from a variety of design problems. The game pretends to be Tetris by slowly making your piece drop over time, while simultaneously demanding you carefully read lots of text about each piece and think about adjacency bonuses. There's no undo button, despite a single mistake potentially ending your entire run. Sometimes, you get pieces in a weird order that force you to place pieces in a bad spot and unlike Tetris—where you can fix mistakes by clearing more lines—Drop Duchy doesn't do that. You fill up the board a single time, and that's your final "score" which must beat the AI's "score" in order to avoid losing HP. This often leads to really unsatisfying outcomes. It's more puzzle than roguelike, which is not what I had hoped for. You don't really get those satisfying, lucky, "overpowered runs" that other roguelike-hybrid games have, but rather experience gradual power increase through the meta-progression system. To give an example of this: during my first run, I felt like I made relatively good decisions, and even got great placement on all my tiles during the boss: making sure to put every important tile in a very optimal spot. But despite that I lost anyways, making me wonder if it was even possible to win with zero run-persistent upgrades: a common problem with games that use meta-progression. To add to this, Drop Duchy's progression system just isn't very interesting, and there seems to be no meaningful decisions, it's just a grind. At the time of purchase, there was no demo available for me to try first.

mobile game with pc game pricetag

cool concept but not really funny

---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☐ Good ☐ Decent ☑ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS ---{ Gameplay }--- ☐ Very good ☐ Good ☑ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{ Audio }--- ☐ Eargasm ☐ Very good ☐ Good ☐ Not too bad ☑ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf ---{ Audience }--- ☑ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ☑ Grandma ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☑ Potato ☐ Decent ☐ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{ Game Size }--- ☐ Floppy Disk ☑ Old Fashioned ☐ Workable ☐ Big ☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive ☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it ☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☑ Easy ☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls ---{ Grind }--- ☐ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☐ Isn't necessary to progress ☐ Average grind level ☑ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding ---{ Story }--- ☑ No Story ☐ Some lore ☐ Average ☐ Good ☐ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☑ Short ☐ Average ☐ Long ☐ To infinity and beyond ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☐ Worth the price ☐ If it's on sale ☑ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money ---{ Bugs }--- ☐ Never heard of ☑ Minor bugs ☐ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs ---{ 4 / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☑ 4 ☐ 5 ☐ 6 ☐ 7 ☐ 8 ☐ 9 ☐ 10

not actually fun, bad mechanics and poor core design. Refunded.

I worked really hard to enjoy this. The early game, before technologies, downright sucked. I almost gave up in the first few hours because my choices felt meaningless. It got better after technologies, but the game still feels bad to play. Having runs end because you were given one piece of your combo on turn one and the other piece on turn twenty three just isn't interesting. I get that the enemy buildings are supposed to force you into making hard choices...but being bullied off of your build in every single match is just tiresome. And the gimmick boss fights - absolute nonsense. Every match just felt like I was playing "Every Decision Is A Bad Decision - The Game" and frankly it was demoralizing. Give the player a little more control over the order of their deck, don't make every enemy the perfect enemy to leech off your build, and for gosh sakes absolutely bin the boss fights.

I feel a little pained giving this game a negative review because conceptually it's a neat idea. It's a deckbuilder mashed up with Tetris: you collect a deck of buildings and can deploy up to 8 per level, which line up and fall Tetris-like alongside a number of terrain tiles, and some enemy buildings. Your buildings either generate resources or provide troops. How the buildings align with the terrain and other buildings determines how effective they are. At the end of each level, your troops fight the enemy troops. Your resources are used to upgrade your buildings and generally develop between battles. There is also a research component - you can research new buildings, technology cards that upgrade your abilities and more. So, where does it go wrong? A deckbuilder works because you can control your deck to create synergies, and deal with and adapt to what the game throws at you. The problem is that in this game the randomness is so high - what cards you get, plus the Tetris game. It fails on the side of making you too vulnerable to RNG. Ironically, it works better at the start than later on: as you research more cards there are too many options and the deckbuilding becomes more chaotic. At this point, you end up struggling just because it's too much luck rather than judgement whether you can make your deck work. It's a critical flaw for this sort of game.

I was hoping to mix the fast paced puzzle solving of tetris with progression around deckbuilding and a resource collection system. Instead it's very slow puzzle game with an arbitrary timer on it that stresses how important card counting is. You only get ~20 tetris pieces. The rows do not clear. I only ever got one long piece per map, but it might change. You need to know the entirety of your block "deck" and plot out what is happening. And then they layer on the "combat" system, which is similar to those phone games where big number beats little number, but they thought that would be too simple, so they layered some weapons triangle onto it. It is both simple and confusing. The tutorial told me there were advantages, but I couldn't find where it said what the advantages were. I didn't play long. I recognized that, if it were to follow other roguelike patterns, the gameplay in higher ascensions would end up being pre-planning what a block deck would "ideally" look like deployed (ex formations around the power pieces) before entering any level and trying to get the order that the blocks come to match with that. This pre-planning would also have to happen before every level, since the "enemy cards" are very important and different from level to level. It felt like a game that rewarded more pre-planning than I would prefer out of roguelike games. Also, maybe just a me thing, but hitting a Tetris and the rows staying there? Feels bad. And having levels end by me doing what traditionally loses in tetris (going over the top) and then finding out I did well? Feels weird.

Slay the Carcassonne Tetrisspire

Rock and stone.

Really interesting game, but the tutorial is missing some important information like how the bosses and walls actually function. Also, it's too easy to play the wrong move, maybe that could be avoided by changing controls. If these would be resolved, experience with this game would be a more pleasant one.

not horrible for a tetris clone with a twist of city builder , not really my cup of tea.

I think the gameplay loop was okay but I want some narrative in my games.

I've spent the last 48 hours in a trace what happened

Where we droppin, duchies

was fun for 10 hours

If you dont see Tetromino's when you close your eyes already this is gonna be a rough one for you

Decent idea. Really do not like the controls or how combat works though. Refunded after the tutorial.

I don't even like tetris and yet here I am enjoying this.

works on steam deck but slow to launch then it's fine. I'd say this is a tetris roguelike deck builder. I would compare it to balatro (tetris instead of solitaire) really fun to play