About Mods: Dota 2 Auto Chess
It’s 2003. Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne expansion set has just been released. A few months prior, a custom game mod for Warcraft III called Defense of the Ancients (or DotA) was released.
This mod that would continuously be developed by the custom map-making community would go on for another 3 years until the lead designers decided to move onto bigger and better projects. League of Legends and Dota 2 owe their very existence to the Warcraft III mod DotA.
But DotA wasn’t the only successful mod in the Warcraft III community. By far it was one of the most popular, but there were plenty of other kinds of games such as tower defense, tanks, battleships, and more! These games were fun but most of them never amounted to the success of DotA.
Enter Auto Chess. Developed by Drodo Studio, a group of Chinese developers, who released the custom game mode in January 2019 under the Dota 2 arcade. The game quickly broke 100k concurrent players and is not unlike the Warcraft III mods of old, as it offers a refreshing look at what a modern strategy game might look like.
Although the title might imply that the game is a variant of Chess, the only resemblance the two games have in common is their title and their checkered boards. The game is about managing your gold, manipulating randomness, and placing chess pieces vs what your opponents are doing. There are four variables that make up a chess piece, the class, the species, the rarity, and the ability. There are a total of 10 classes, 14 species, and up to 5 rarities, which makes for a lot of chess pieces and abilities to wrap your head around.
The game is round based, and each round starts with a randomly generated list of chess pieces to pick from. The list is chosen based on a pool of chess pieces that over time players will exhaust. Once you spend some gold to buy a piece, it will appear on your bench, which can store up to 8 pieces. There is a limit to how many chess pieces you can put on your side of the board. Your level corresponds to this piece limit and can be upgraded with gold. Additionally, 3 of the same type of chess pieces can combine to create an even stronger piece, up to 2 times.
Now if this was just a wave-based survival game like the single player mode, that would be cool, but the interesting part of the design is how Auto Chess integrates other players. Similar to the battle royale game Tetris 99, where your tetris lines carry over to other players, during PvP (player vs player) rounds your chess board state is copied over to a random enemy’s board. During those turns you will receive a random enemies board to fight, and if there are any enemies left standing on the board at the end of the round you take damage. When the round ends the enemies disappear so your pieces can respawn at the start of the new round. Last man standing wins as you out-strategize your 7 other opponents.
What this game supplies that traditional strategy games don’t offer is merely the amount of depth there is. But you may be thinking Hearthstone has a ton of depth! And you would be right, Hearthstone with its many cards, abilities, randomness, and placement can produce a huge variety of experiences. However, the chess board mechanic and how some pieces are melee or ranged adds a whole new dimension to the strategy game. In fact, it wouldn’t work without it. If the game let you simply place pieces freely however you want, I’d wager that the combat wouldn’t feel as clean and orderly, which is immensely important for strategy games. Without this discernable order of events the game devolves into chaos. With this round based, grid locked placement mechanic, there is ample time for players to think through decisions and see how their choices play out on the battlefield.
Of course, Auto Chess isn’t perfect, especially since for better or worse the mechanics are integrated with that of Dota 2, so you need some Dota 2 knowledge to play it. That, and the tutorial and lack of documentation makes learning the intricate mechanics a little challenging, but the players that enjoy strategic challenges will find a game that is surprisingly well designed although somewhat imbalanced in its current state.
Many companies have already taken notice of this rare gaming phenomena as in late February a Chinese esports production company ImbaTV announced the first Auto Chess competitive event. In fact, one of the first Auto Chess invitational tournaments happened earlier this month with a $10,000 prize pool. A decent amount of money for a game-mod that was unheard of just a few months ago. Something that Warcraft III DotA only wishes it could have had, but with the rise of esports, times have changed.
Like big Warcraft III mods, the Warcraft III or in this case Dota 2 community is the first to learn about these new kinds of games. Which begs the question, would these games have had the critical success we know of without the release of a game-mod creation kit? Impossible to know, but it is clear that the community that played Warcraft III DotA went on to found new communities in the future. Meaning that if the Auto Chess community keeps growing there is going to eventually be standalone clients for Auto Chess like games. There the design of the game will be refined into products as mechanically intriguing as League of Legends and Dota 2 are today. I can’t wait to see what designers rework, scrap, and add to Auto Chess.
As discussed in my article about battle royales, games that incorporate unique and skillful ways for players to interact with each other is what makes the genre fun. Auto Chess is no different, albeit it is no Apex Legends with instant AAA success. With that being said, will Auto Chess revolutionize online strategy games similar to how DotA revolutionized the online battle arena? Only time will tell.
