In my previous post on Autochess I explained some things about the game, and tried to shed some light on its sudden popularity. In this piece, I’ll cover some of the developments since then, firstly covering adaptations by different companies, and secondly showing some of the ways in which the core mechanics have influenced several smaller games.

Adaptations

Since the Autochess mod made a big splash, its massive success and the relative simplicity of the systems involved have led quite a few big names to throw their own hat into the ring, with various degrees of success.

The makers of the original mod made their own standalone game without changing much of their original mechanical design, superficially filing the serial numbers off the Dota 2 characters. They were first to market with their mobile client, and recently put their PC version on the Epic game store, but there’s been little buzz around it that I noticed.

Close on their heels were Valve, with Dota Underlords. They were of course free to use the Dota 2 character models, voice work and so forth, and were also rather quick to release a mobile version. The gameplay was a pretty straight copy of the regular autochess mod, although they have since deviated significantly with their handling of items, and even added team-based play.

As an aside, I find it darkly hilarious that Valve made an autochess knockoff instead of somehow acquiring or hiring the mod’s creators, given the extremely tangled history of Dota 2 itself: Defence of the Ancients was a mod for Warcraft 3 (a Blizzard game, more on them in a second), based on a mod for Starcraft, which in turn is based on Warhammer 40,000. Then, Valve decided to make Dota 2, hiring a famously pseudonymous designer (Icefrog) who had shepherded the DotA Allstars mod through its most succesful period as a competitive game. Blizzard responded with a lawsuit, which was ultimately settled out of court. Afterwards, Valve and Blizzard even collaborated on suing several other developers for creating mobile games which copied existing characters too closely. All this is to say there’s a fine line between riffing on an idea and blatant copying. There’s a ton more drama and legal/ownership wrangling surrounding DotA and its various re-inventions and spin-offs but it’s been described better by others so I’ll leave it at this.

One of the original Dota-copiers, Riot Games of League of Legends fame, also released their own spin on the autochess formula, called Teamfight Tactics. Of the various followups, this one feels the most like a mod, grafted on top of the base League of Legends game, though there also is a mobile port now. In other words, the game company that got big by re-implementing a mod modded their own game to re-implement another mod. I hope you can see why I find all this so entertaining.

And of course, Blizzard could not remain behind, and came up with by far the largest departure from the original formula: Hearthstone Battlegrounds. Here, each player’s two-dimensional chess map is replaced with a one-dimensional line (much like how one’s minions line up in a regular Hearthstone match), and the game is chock-full of effects that persist across battles (for example, minions that grow permanently whenever they get a kill), making the winner often the player who can snowball their team into unstoppable juggernauts the most convincingly. It’s interesting but not surprising that they chose to adapt their massively succesful digital card game rather than their much less successful Dota adaptation (Heroes of the Storm). It’s also worth noting that, going by streaming numbers at least, Hearthstone Battlegrounds is the most succesful game in the autochess/autobattler genre by quite some margin. Part of this might be that many entrenched Hearthstone constructed players such as Kripparian switched to Battlegrounds and simply took their audience with them, but that still raises the question why they made the switch in the first place.

Needless to say, all these offerings are monetized using variations on the free-to-play model, selling various forms of cosmetic doodads and lootboxes.

Core mechanics

To recap, the core mechanics of the autochess genre games are:

• buying units from a randomly-determined pool, with the option to spend resources to re-roll
• upgrading units by collecting duplicates
• gaining bonuses by collecting multiple minions with the same trait
• placing these units in certain formations with a tactical goal in mind
• a hands-off battle phase where your formation autonomously fights
• a strict limit to the number of units you can field and hold in reserve, necessitating hard choices about what to keep

There are obviously many ways in which these mechanics can be added to and remixed. I’ll discuss several examples I recently enjoyed below.

Vivid Knight

Vivid knight shop

Official site

This Japanese game takes the PvP autochess mechanics and grafts them onto a PvE roguelike dungeon diver, with a thin anime plot.It has all the core autochess mechanics, but has some interesting additions. First, once you upgrade a particular unit for the first time, you permanently gain access to its traits, so you could simply sell it back after upgrading (albeit at a loss) if it’s not a unit you plan to use. This creates the interesting tension that often you might want to actually be using unupgraded units in your party, since they still provide you with extra traits. For example, having 3 orange units makes it so that in the first round each of your units in the team will use their special abiity. If you have upgraded and sold two different orange units previously, adding one unupgraded orange unit to your team is sufficient to trigger this bonus. The game is balanced so that you eventually do need to start using upgraded units, or your low-level forces will start getting one-shot killed.

Besides the trait system and the navigation of the dungeon, Vivid Knight adds a hero who is the protagonist for that dungeon dive, and who can use special abilities (gems) every combat round. Unlike most autochess games, here the game is somewhat turn-based: your hero uses a gem (or declines to do so), then your party and the enemies each act, ordered by agility score. It’s less hands-on than a real tactics game but there’s more mid-combat decision-making than usual.

Vivid knight battle

I’ve quite enjoyed my time with the game - the runs are just about the right length for a small break, and don’t outstay their welcome, but definitely do get challenging enough to be engaging.

SNKRX

Github repository

SNKRX is an unlikely mashup that works extremely well. Take the classic game Snake, free the snake from its rigid grid, and compose the snake’s body of a mix of different fantasy characters that each have a different special power or attack. Apply low-fidelity graphics, add a banging soundtrack and wave-based combat, embed the whole thing in a roguelike death-restart loop and you have what turns out to be a recipe for success. Again, all the core autochess mechanics are there, but placed in a drastically different context. The game’s dirt cheap at three bucks, and is also available on Android. Heartily recommended for action fans with a bit of an extra layer. The presentation is also really well-done, with the differently-coloured characters in your snake turning into an attractice rainbow.

Storybook Brawls

Finally, I want to mention Storybook Brawls - the linked article does an excellent job describing it. As a PvP game, this has a much higher barrier to entry, and I’m not sure I’ll stick with it, but it’s been fun so far.