Drop Duchy is an interesting roguelike-slash boardgame-style game that I decreed can be a little too board-game style in that sometimes your strategy comes together like clockwork, and sometimes you wind up with 12 dudes, the other guy has 75, and you have no idea what happened. That said, it can be a good time, and it has done well enough to merit a DLC.
The Tribe DLC Brings Fresh Mechanics and Challenges to Drop Duchy
This DLC is called The Tribe, which introduces a faction called…wait for it…The Tribe. They use Stone Circles and Cairns and sacrificial sites, and let’s just say they’re a strange race of people…no one knows who they are…or…what they are doing….
The Tribe has a unique mechanic built around aligning Standing Stones to increase their domain and gather resources, which is the way you generally Do Stuff in Drop Duchy (unlock cards and refill your Defense, etc.). You get Cairn cards and try to build a rectangular area on the game board containing as many buildings and resources as possible, ideally with the Standing Stones inside. Of course, the random nature of the draw makes planning for this very tricky, but the Standing Stones are very powerful. If you can get it within the rectangle of the Cairns (assuming you draw them in the right order and get them in the right shape), it explores all the squares within range, gathering a lot of resources if you manage to pull the whole thing off.
This whole…rectangle gameplay makes for an interesting strategic twist on the core Tetris-style gameplay, since now you’re not just trying to get the Tetris-type lines, you’re trying to set up a nice rectangle with the Cairns, then get the Standing Stones tile to land within them to maximize the resources you grab. It adds a new gameplay mechanic and way of thinking, but keeps the core “arranging gameplay tiles like Tetris” gameplay intact. Generally, the game is recognizable, even if you have to think about things differently.
The Tribe also comes with new technologies and cards for the…Tribe (note how cleverly I shift my use of italics). The Druid Hut is a production card that gives defense and food. The Lush Woods technology adds Food to Forest cards (which means they provide Food and Wood, making a deck built around exploiting Forest tiles that much more powerful). The War Council recruits for each square explored during the round. The Law Court technology removes units from every enemy building in the Cairns’ boundaries, and the Sacrificial Site recruits a unit for every unit removed during a round, giving it synergy with some of the existing tiles like Siege Camps.
Other additions include Constellations for all factions. These allow you to select a power of your choice and trigger it during a round. These can modify a piece’s shape, the terrain type, or even remove enemies from the tile. However, they require time to charge up before you can use them. Constellations can be swapped during the run…but swapping them resets the charges, meaning you have to start all over with the build. It’s another way to change up the gameplay without altering the core formula.
For those with super-tuned decks and those that can’t get enough droppin’ they duchys, they’re also adding Endless Mode. Once you complete the final act, every location is going to be a combat encounter, and there’s a new tier of Elite foes to be conquered in Endless Mode.
The formula that made it interesting isn’t changing, so if you’ve been yearning for a roguelike board game, The Tribe provides even more opportunity to throw down tiles, drop duchies, and optimize your deckbuilding.
