How do you play Dota Auto Chess (刀塔自走棋)? First purchase chess pieces shaped like familiar Dota 2 heroes from randomized packs of five drawn from a common pool shared with eight other players. Then place your pieces, or chesses (棋), on an eight-by-eight grid where they attack and defend against other players’ boards in a round robin tower defense tournament. Like poker or mahjong, strengthen your tableaux by finding three of a kind and synergizing between suits (and, like bridge or Dominion, be careful to keep track of what your competitors are collecting!) Finally, craft randomly dropped items along a MineCraft-type tech tree and reinvest compound interest back into your bank to strengthen a StarCraft-style macroeconomy for late game. A mod of a remake of a mod, Drodo Studio’s (巨鸟多多工作室) Auto Chess is a digital calvinball that mashes up computer and board game genres to create something unexpected: a metagame that remixes
the meanings and mechanics of Dota 2 to reveal new forms of play. One of the most popular new videogames of 2019, Auto Chess and its many spin offs by Valve, Riot, and Tencent are currently outperforming its direct (and more widely funded and advertised) competitor, Richard Garfield and Valve’s digital card game Artifact (Warr 2019).
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