Dota Auto Chess Seems Like It Might Become the Next Big Thing

Dota Auto Chess has stormed the game’s community overnight, and in the ten days since it was released it managed to gather around 15% of the game’s concurrent users in its new arena. It’s more popular than Artifact, which was supposed to fill the same gap officially. It still requires all the knowledge regular Dota 2 games do, but with none of the dexterity. But what is it, actually? Well, here’s a short explanation, and a video of a competent player going at it.

The name is actually a pretty good description. It’s a game for one to eight players, in which each has an 8×8 board where they can place units from Dota 2. In order to place them, they first need gold, which is gained by doing well. Once everyone’s placed their units, the first round starts. The units will fight among themselves automatically, so there’s almost no input required here. When the round is over, you’ll get some gold and a random pool of units you can buy. Rinse and repeat as you get more and more gold, stronger units and a higher unit cap. There’s so much more to it obviously – the rock, paper, scissors way in which units interact, items, unit upgrades and such – but these are the basics.

It was made by a team of five people, and according to the mod’s Steam page, 750k players have tried it at the time of writing. That’s a pretty nice number there. It has already been patched several time to address balancing issues, and the devs continue to work on it daily – no doubt further fueled by the enormous success. Some are already predicting microtransactions and the end of everything as we know it, but it’s unclear what the future holds for Dota Football Manager.