Auto Chess is a strategy game genre where you build a team of units on a board and then watch them fight automatically each round, with your goal being to outlast other players and be the final survivor.

Core Idea

Auto Chess started as a custom mod for Dota 2 called Dota Auto Chess , created by Drodo Studio in early 2019. Its success was so huge that it spawned its own genre, often called “auto battlers,” and led to standalone games like Auto Chess, Dota Underlords, and Teamfight Tactics.

How a Match Works

In a typical Auto Chess match:

  • Around eight players join a lobby, each with their own health total.
  • Each round, you buy units from a random shop and place them on your side of a grid-like board.
  • When the round starts, units fight automatically with no direct control from you, which is where the “auto” part comes from.
  • If you lose a round, you take damage based on how many enemy units survived on the board.
  • The game continues until only one player has health left; that player wins.

Strategy, Not Just Watching

Even though battles resolve automatically, the strategy is in everything that happens between rounds.

Key decisions include:

  • What units to buy from the shared, random pool.
  • How to combine copies of the same unit to “star up” and make stronger versions.
  • How to position front-line and back-line units on the board.
  • When to save gold for interest versus when to spend aggressively to power up your board.

This makes it feel closer to a team-management or tactics game than traditional chess, even though it uses a chessboard-like grid.

Basic Gameplay Loop (Step-by-step)

  1. Start a match with a small amount of gold and a random shop of units.
  1. Buy units you like, place them on your board, and arrange their positions.
  1. The round begins: your team automatically fights another player’s team or neutral enemies.
  1. After the fight, you gain gold, possibly experience, and sometimes items, then return to the shop phase.
  1. Combine three copies of the same unit into a stronger higher-star unit; repeat as the game goes on.
  1. Keep upgrading and repositioning until either you are eliminated (health reaches zero) or you outlast everyone else.

Why It Became a Big Deal

  • It turned complex MOBA heroes into a slower, more strategic draft-and-position game that’s easier to watch and follow.
  • It quickly became one of the most popular new genres around 2019, with huge player counts and major studios (Valve, Riot) creating their own versions.
  • Matches are relatively short (often 20–40 minutes), but have deep meta-strategy and high replayability because the shop and opponents change every time.

Today’s Context

By now, “Auto Chess” is both:

  • A specific standalone game from Drodo Studio.
  • A generic name many players use for the whole auto battler genre, including games like Dota Underlords and Teamfight Tactics.

In forum and social discussions, when people ask “what is Auto Chess,” they usually mean this entire style of auto battler where you draft units, place them on a board, and let them auto-fight while you focus on economy, synergies, and positioning.

TL;DR: Auto Chess is a multiplayer, round-based strategy game where you buy and position units on a board, then they auto-battle other players’ teams until only one player remains.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.