The last few years have been all about Battle Royales, before that, Hero Shooters. Further back yet, MOBAs, Roguelikes, survival games, crafting games, CoD-style shooters, instrument-peripheral-based music games, the list goes on until we reach 1998, where the fad was ‘well-constructed games featuring high-quality storytelling and gameplay.
Maybe that fad will return, but it’s not coming this year, because in 2019 we’ve got Auto Battlers like Dota Underlords, Team fight Tactics and Auto Chess.
What am I playing?
Auto Battlers, or Auto Chesses — as they would be known if we stuck with calling it Auto Chess as a genre — are relatively new in the gaming world, entering the scene this year by way of Drodo’s custom map on the Dota 2 Arcade, where it single-handedly reminded non-Dota players that Dota 2 exists.
As a concept it’s quite a bit older, however, hearkening back to Warcraft 3 custom maps like Pokemon Defense, which took Tower Defense and turned it into a hero-based team management game.
The Dota 2 custom map is called Auto Chess largely for the board the game takes place on — an eight-by-eight battlefield upon which you place your team of heroes during a preparation phase. The Auto Battler name comes from what happens next — your heroes duke it out against another team, and the results are determined without any input from you. Once the battle phase begins, the fighting is automatic — hence Auto Battler.
How am I playing it?
The basics are simple — at the start of your game, you select a hero, you place the hero on the game board, and then it battles on your behalf. If you win your battle, you get a bit of extra gold and everything is cool. If you lose, you lose a bit of health. There are seven other players in the game, and each of them has their own heroes, game boards and health totals. The winner is the last team standing.
There’s a fly in the ointment, however, and it’s critical to what makes an Auto Battler interesting. The heroes you select for your team are offered to you largely at random. You aren’t guaranteed any one particular hero. And worse still, the heroes you’re getting? They come from the same pool of heroes that the other seven teams are purchasing from. Using Dota Underlords as an example, if you want to buy a Drow Ranger, and the other seven people playing with you want to also buy a Drow Ranger, the odds of one of you missing out are quite high.
Better still, you don’t want just one Drow Ranger. You can combine three of her into a single two-star variant which is more powerful. And you can combine three two-stars into a single three-star. So, provided it works for your team composition, you actually want nine Drow Rangers.
She’ll never win you a match on her lonesome either. She needs to have friends, and deciding which friends are best for her is far from simple. She’s
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