Auto Chess is a community-made custom game that can be played inside Dota 2’s client – the creators are a group of Chinese developers called Drodo Studio. There are many custom games inside Dota, however, what’s unique about Auto Chess is its amazing growth and popularity. It has:

• 3 million Subscriptions and growing (i.e. active users, excluding Chinese players)
• Above 150k concurrent players. At the time of writing this, the concurrent users inside the Dota client were around 600k. This means that 20% of the people in the client were playing the custom game.
• A flawless 5-star rating from 1+ million votes.

Those numbers make Dota Auto Chess the third most popular game on Steam. It’s ahead of Rainbow Six Siege and behind CS:GO, Dota and PUBG. It is one of the fastest growing PC games of 2019. Inevitably, people outside of Dota are starting to take notice. There are people who never played Dota before who are downloading the game specifically to play Auto Chess. Downloading a 20GB game (albeit free) to play a custom map is quite the commitment. A couple of variety streamers and interestingly – many card game (especially Hearthstone) streamers are also playing it - Savjz, Kripparian, Hafu, Trump, etc. We believe the round-based nature of the game and its strategic depth make it a great fit for CG fans. The implications of this are that we might be witnessing the birth of the new hot genre. There have been similar games before (mainly thanks to Warcraft 3’s map editor), but none so successful. If Auto Chess is the equivalent of PUBG in the battle royal genre, then what will be the Fortnite of Auto Chess? The Chinese juggernaut Tencent seems to be aiming at answering that question. They recently launched a customer survey asking people if they are interested to see a similar game – standalone on mobile, or in their PC or mobile MOBA. One thing is certain – in the coming months, there will be at least a few Auto Chess clones. People in the community are joking that after Valve made a standalone game out of Dota 1, which was a WarCraft 3 custom game, in order to go full circle Blizzard needs to acquire Drodo Studio and make a standalone game for Auto Chess. They seem to be into the Chinese mobile market nowadays anyway! What’s the game about:

• You earn gold and buy units from a shop. The shop changes its unit inventory each round, so there is an element of randomness you need to deal with.
• You upgrade your units and try to combine them synergistically based on race, class, and abilities to make the strongest possible army. You place your army on an 8x8.
• Your army fights the army of other players automatically each round. When you lose the round, you lose HP. The last man standing is the winner.

It’s a simple concept, but the depth of managing your economy, building the perfect army, as well as the element of randomness make it very addicting. The learning curve is steep, however, so if you want to get off to a good start, you can check out this detailed Dota Auto Chess Beginner Guide! If you’re already an experienced player, you can check out the Dota Auto Chess Tier List or the Auto Chess Strategy Guide instead!

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