Drop Duchyis a clever blend of strategic tile placement with Tetris-style block dropping, but it’s a different enough take on both that even experienced players might need some time to adjust. Its fast-playing levels and unlockable build options mean there are plenty of reasons to keep coming back, though, offering tons of rewarding replayability.

Before you start tossing blocks onto the grid, consider getting your bearings with these tips. Using the strategies outlined below, you’ll be able to improve your game right from the start, unlocking new factions and experiencing all that the game has to offer.

a peaceful region with plains and forests, and many holes in the grid, in drop duchy.

Remember, It’s Not Tetris

It’s fair to guess that if you’re playing Drop Duchy, you’ve played at least a littleTetris. Many of the strategies that work in the king of puzzle games will work in Drop Duchy… but not all of them.

It’s still a good idea toget as many lines as possible in a single drop, since you’ll get more resources than if you’d explored the lines individually, but the most important thing to remember is thatlines don’t leave the board.The grid is going to keep getting smaller, and there’s no way to dig yourself out.

the player chooses whether to enter a hostile region or avoid combat in on the world map in drop duchy.

On the other hand,hitting the top of the grid isn’t the end of the run. It’s generally best to use every piece when possible, but sometimes you can actually give yourself an advantage by going over the top to force an early end.

Get Quests Out Of The Way Early

Drop Duchy isn’t the kind of roguelike that expects you to win on your first attempt. It’s probably possible, but without the unlocks and upgrades that you get from completing Quests, it’s pretty unlikely.

For your first few runs,try to focus on completing Quests over actually beating bosses. That way, you’ll unlock more new buildings and starting bonuses faster, and be in a better position to make serious attempts.

the preparation phase with six buildings in drop duchy.

At the start of a new run, you’ll be limited to your faction’s starting deck. You’ll quickly be asked to pick new buildings, though, and to have a shot at completing the campaign, you’ll need to have a plan.

Before visiting the first region,scroll up on the mapto look at what terrain types will be featured on your way to the first boss. In the first Act, you’ll want to focus ontwo of the three - Plains, Forests, and Rivers, so pick the two that show up the most and build around those.

a mercenary camp is kept in reserve to prevent it from spawning in drop duchy.

Rivers in particular tend to be either very good or very bad, depending on their prevalence in Act 1, so deciding whether to exploit them or ignore them is often an important decision.

When In Doubt, Unlock Building Slots

Even with an efficient build, upgrade costs are high enough in Drop Duchy that you need to be mindful of how you spend your hard-earned resources. In general, though, you can always be confident thatFood spent on new building slots won’t go to waste.

Your deck will quickly exceed the number of slots that you can bring to a battle, and even with every slot unlocked you’ll still have to choose your loadout carefully in each region. The more slots you have, though, themore Production and Military buildingsyou can drop onto the grid, giving you more troops with which to win battles and more resources for the campaign ahead.

a combat overview in drop duchy after winning on a river map by 49 troops.

Keep Enemy Buildings In Reserve

You can store a single block in Reserve, keeping it until a better time to use it. This is incredibly useful for making sure you get a perfect drop that combos with just the right terrain or explores four lines at once, but it can also be used toforce the enemy to fight with one fewer building.

If the last block in the queue gets locked into place, or you go over the top of the grid, and there’s a block in Reserve,the Reserved block is simply lost.That means that if you just keep an enemy building there until the end of the round, it - and all the soldiers it would have contained - are gone from the map entirely!

the dungeon looms over the world map at the end of act 3 in drop duchy.

Pay attention to how each enemy building gets Reinforcements - you can only use this trick to prevent one enemy building from landing, so it’s better to place buildings with small Garrisons that you can prevent from Reinforcing and keep the more dangerous one locked away.

Win By A Lot Or Lose By A Little

The best outcome on any grid is tohave as many allied soldiers left over after the battle as possible.Each surviving troopearns you one Gold- it’s not much, but if you’re able to consistently win battles decisively, it adds up.

Of course, sometimes the block order or the enemy’s selected buildings just aren’t favorable. Having enemy troops left over instead of allied troops isn’t ideal, but when you lose a battleyou want to lose by as little as possible.Each surviving enemy troopreduces your faction’s Defense, inching you closer to losing the run.

Restoring one point of Defense costs 10 Gold, so each surviving enemy is worth 10 surviving allies; that’s not a favorable exchange rate in the least!

If you can’t avoid losing a battle,make sure that as few enemies survive as possibleto mitigate the damage that you take.As long as your Defense is still above zero, you’ll be able to continue your run.

Ties Go To The Reinforced Army For Determining Class

One of the keys to winning battles iscombining armiesto take advantage of the class triangle. Swords beat Bows, Bows beat Axes, and Axes beat Swords, and if you move an allied army onto another, they’llmerge into one large army, all of the same class as the larger of the two.

If the merged armies are the exact same size, though,they’ll keep the class of the army that was not moving. For example, if you move 15 Swords onto an allied army of 15 Axes, it will become an army of 30 Axes - the numbers are tied, so the reinforced army determines the class of the combined force. If it had been 16 Swords, it would be a combined army of 31 Swords, because there were more Swords than Axes.

Remember To Heal Before Boss Fights

Healing is expensive, and not a particularly efficient way of spending your Gold. However, you shouldalways heal as much as you’re able to before a boss fight.

Boss fortresses havelarge garrisonsthat get bigger with every mistake you make, whether the error is forced by the state of the board or a genuine slip-up on your part. Unless you have an extremely well-tuned deck and the battle goes off without a hitch,you’re very likely to take some damage to your Defenseat the end fo the fight.

Forgetting to heal can and will cause you to lose the run byas little as two or three Defense points; at that point, all the Gold you saved doesn’t matter anymore. Spend the Gold, restore your Defense, and stay in the game. You can always earn the Gold back in the next Act, but if the boss defeats you it’s back to the beginning.