Dota Auto Chess custom mode one of Steam's most popular games

Auto Chess a digital version of board games with Dota2 heroes. The hard working couriers of the Dota2 like to spend their vacation at Drodo Island where they play this version of chess to pass time.

If you believe the internal tracking in the Dota 2 client, upwards of 260,000 concurrent players are engaging in a single custom map: Dota Auto Chess. It's definitely not chess aside from the battleground being shaped like a 8x8 chess board, it doesn't really have much to do with a traditional chess game. Rather, it has more similarities and elements from tactical board games like Neuroshima Hex, Warcraft 3 mods Legion TD and Pokemon defense or even the laning aspect of Artifact. Although the characters share some similar abilities to Dota 2 counterparts, it's absolutely not Dota either.

At the beginning of each round, you are given a random hand of heroes to draft, purchase and deploy them to the grid and carry out automated battles against other players.
Putting units of the same race and class together has powerful and often game-deciding effects. For instance, a team stacked with mages will cause the opposing team's magic resistance to greatly decrease, meaning your spells will absolutely ravage them. Assassin stacks get giant crits and jump to the backline, knights get shields, mechs regen, hunters get massive damage boosts – you get the idea. Mixing and matching race/class combinations to stack all kinds of bonuses and effects is critical to success.
Ranking up is an important aspect of the game and another layer of strategy, as it makes your characters much more powerful. To rank up, you'll need three of the same unit, which is made more difficult if everyone in your game is trying to play the same races/classes as there is a limited amount of units, so it's to your benefit to try and seek out lesser-played characters in order to rank them up easier.
In addition to attempting to forge the best team, keeping an eye on your funds is critical. You get money from wins, win streaks, lose streaks, and interest each round. You can sandbag early on and take some losses and damage to try to get a big loss streak which is also a solid strategy, commonly known as empty fort.
Dota Auto Chess has all the best strategy game aspects: RNG, strategy, positioning, synergy, gambling, PvP, ladder, Tower Defense, counter play.
A random number generator RNG is a computational or physical device designed to generate a sequence of numbers or symbols that lack any pattern, appear random. With so many different heroes and by having multiple copies of them players need to be extremely lucky to get good rolls. For some gamers it’s a major turn-off to hear that gameplay revolves around luck, but it takes more skill than luck in order to succeed, has a very high skill cap, you have to make the best out of any situation, but sometimes people just get unlucky and this is where the gambling aspect comes into play. You can spend 2 of your gold to reroll your hero hand and hopefully high roll.
Another crucial aspect of Dota Auto Chess is positioning, there are many different position strategies: straight line formation, Two seperate groups, keeping everything spread to avoid area of effect, etc. As i mentioned before assassins jump to the backline, so in order to counter them you must protect your backline by positioning urself into a corner.
Another huge aspect of Dota Auto Chess which comes into play later is counter play. When there is only a few people left on the board players usually try to reposition their units according to the enemy teams. Also since there is only a limited amount of heroes it's a good idea to look at enemy boards to see if they are looking for any unit combinations that could turn the tide in their favor and counter pick them.
Each round you face a random opponent from whoever is remaining in the game, until there's only one left standing. Placing in the top three will net you some candy, which you can use to unlock cosmetics you can use from game to game. After a few games, you'll also get a ranking based on chess pieces, like pawn, knight, or bishop, and this will go up and down as you continue to play games.

Every so often the custom map scene has a mod that catches fire, exactly how Dota 2 started, Dota was the most popular Warcraft 3 custom map. Overall, I find the game a ton of fun to play, I can definitely understand why and how it caught on fire in such a short amount of time. So if you're curious like I was and If you're into this sort of strategy experience, you can play Dota Auto Chess insde the Dota 2 client (which is free) on Steam. It takes a few games to start to understand how everything works, but it's got some really fun strategy hooks underneath everything. It can difficult at the start with limited preperation time (30 seconds).
Let me know if you'd like to see more of Dota Auto Chess, we could cover strategies, units, etc. in depth.
Including a gameplay video: