Started as a MOBA mod, Auto Chess is now spawning its own MOBA

After starting out as a mod for Dota 2, Auto Chess led the brand new genre of auto-battlers to inspire devs including Valve and Riot, then spawned its own standalone game, and now it's coming all the way back round to the start with an Auto Chess MOBA. So its Dota-inspired characters will now star in a Dota-like game. Our industry is a marvel. But which new genre will begin as an Auto Chess MOBA mod?

Auto Chess publishers Dragonest announced the MOBA spin-off/rebirth/homecoming earlier this month, Kotaku noted. I am genuinely delighted to see it come back round. What a weird series of events. I do not have high hopes for this particular game but I gotta find joy in the world's cycles.

If you missed Auto Chess and the games it inspired (which include Valve's Dota Underlords, Riot's Teamfight Tactics, and Blizzard's Hearthstone Battlegrounds), no, it's nothing to do with chess beyond taking place on a chequered board. It's a round-based multiplayer game where players draft characters, combine them with multiples of their kind to level them up, then position them on a board for a fight controlled wholly by the AI. Reminds me more of tower defence games like Gem TD than MOBAs, really. Matt explain what an auto-battler is in more detail last year in 2019. If you need me to tell you what a MOBA is, ah come on, surely this is wilful ignorance by now.

Auto Chess is available free-to-play on the Epic Games Store. Or the Dota 2 mod Auto Chess is on the Steam Workshop.

Next, I would like to see an official Auto Chess MOBA chess set. Then Auto Chess skins based on classic chess pieces. To be followed by Valve officially adding an Auto Chess character to Dota 2.