So, you want to get into Auto Chess games. ACs...Auto Battlers? Regardless of what you call them, these games have quickly become some of them most popular and exciting games out right now.

The genre is simple on the surface. Using money you acquire every turn, you buy units from a shared pool that smack the enemy's units until either you or your opponent wins. But the beauty's in the depth. There's plenty of variables to consider once you're deep into Auto Battlers, like items, the placement of your units, unit upgrades, character classes / factions and the bonuses they provide. Once you better understand these games they reveal themselves to be the hardcore strategy titles they truly are, demanding you play meticulously or end up beaten or worse, broke.

Dota Auto Chess, Dota Underlords, Teamfight Tactics and Auto Chess all have their distinct differences and individual perks, and everyone's bound to have a favourite. This article will introduce you to all four of the Auto Chess games and delve into what sets them apart from the others, highlighting unique features to help you figure which ones to start playing.

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The auto chess wars have begun.

Sparked by the surprise success of the Dota auto chess mod, created by Chinese team Drodo Studio, a number of big-name publishers and developers have quickly turned around efforts of their own - and they're proving early doors big hits.

Auto chess games are "auto battlers", that is, they're turn-based competitive multiplayer strategy games in which you send units out onto a board divided up into squares, then the combat plays out automatically. There's more to the genre than this, of course, but that's essentially it.

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Valve has released a new game - Dota Underlords.

Dota Underlords is the company's standalone take on the Auto Chess explosion - and is sparked by the hugely popular Dota Auto chess mod for Dota 2.

Like Dota Auto Chess, Dota Underlords doesn't really have anything to do with chess, except it's played out on a board. Like Dota Auto Chess, Dota Underlords pits you against seven opponents and involves building, combining and leveling up a crew of characters from the Dota universe. Round after round you buy new characters, discover powerful items, deploy them on the board and watch the combat play out automatically. It's not about twitch reflexes. Rather, this is a considered turn-based strategy game in which you can sit back and watch the action play out.

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The world of pro Dota 2 is no stranger to drama and controversy. Gabe Newell once called a esports host an "ass" and fired him mid broadcast after he opened the show with jokes about Chinese porn. Players have written 7500-word blog posts about not being paid. And a tournament's Major status was revoked mere weeks before the event because players were worried about failing Filipino drug tests.

But now there is another controversy in the world of Dota involving racism, massively offensive comments, and players having to make a stand in order to get some kind of acknowledgement from Valve.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS LANGUAGE SOME MAY FIND OFFENSIVE

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Valve has announced it will make its own version of the immensely popular Dota Auto Chess mod.

What will become of the original mod is now unclear. Valve staff invited the mod's creators, Chinese team Drodo Studio, to meet with them in February. There were discussions about working together, a blog post from Valve states: "but we both came to the conclusion that Valve and Drodo could not work directly with each other for a variety of reasons.

"We ended up agreeing that we'll each build our own stand-alone version of the game, and support each other to the fullest."

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It's another day of innovation in the games industry, as the latest CS:GO update introduces respawns and a ping system to the game's battle royale mode.

Update Sirocco brings some major changes to servers, and along with introducing a new desert-themed map (of the same name) it's adding a few mechanics which are becoming rather common in the battle royale genre. The new respawn system will allow players to resurrect "anywhere in the map" providing their squad survives. Players will have the option to either resurrect where they died or pick a new starting spot.

To be fair to CS:GO, this respawn system seems a little different to the one used by Apex Legends - and then Fortnite - which requires squadmates to pick up their teammates' banner and carry it to a respawn beacon. If anything this sounds more like Call of Duty's Down But Not Out mode for Blackout, which similarly just requires squadmates to remain alive before allowing respawns (albeit with each new circle).

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Epic has responded to growing concern its launcher accesses users' Steam data without permission.

The company responded to a post on the subreddit for Phoenix Point, itself the focus of a controversy after signing a deal to go exclusive with the Epic Games store for a year, in which a user revealed the Epic Games store client pokes around your computer when it shouldn't.

In the post, titled Epic Game Store, Spyware, Tracking, and You!, redditor notte_m_portent accused Epic of running processes and making attempts to access DLLs and root certificates without letting the user know. According to the post, the data obtained was found to be sent to Epic, and the Epic Games store app was found to store hardware information in the registry.

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Valve has announced a couple of new Steam features ahead of this year's GDC - although neither are to do with sorting its abject mess of a store curation policy.

Steam Link Anywhere extends the ability to connect to your PC and play games remotely via the Steam Link hardware or app on a supported phone, tablet or TV. Now, you'll be able to connect to any other computer running Steam and play games remotely via the internet, too.

The feature is described as being in early beta still - only those with beta firmware will see it at present. Valve warns you'll need a good connection.

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Viktor Antonov hasn't built a world like this before.

The games you know him for are bounded and largely linear. Every tiny detail has been touched by a human hand in Half-Life 2's City 17 or Dishonored's Dunwall, striking virtual places which Antonov has helped colour with particular social histories and inscribed with visual techniques that quietly guide the player to the next checkpoint. That's also true of other games that he's been involved with over the past few years, such as Wolfenstein: The New Order, Prey and Doom, on which Antonov acted as visual design director.

But Project C, as the game is currently codenamed, is very different. "It's one of the most ambitious projects I've worked on and, I have to admit, a fairly difficult one for me," he says.

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In my younger and more vulnerable years, I spent a lot of time getting shot in the head in Counter-Strike: Source. While there were many factors working against me - my age, my characteristic lack of dexterity, my (for the time) toaster-level PC, and my bargain-bin 200 DPI Dell laser mouse - I never let these disadvantages stop me from padding some lucky player's K/D ratio with my ill-fated MAC-10 rushes. When I would search through the list of servers for players of a similar skill level, I would come across a panoply of fan-made mods and maps intended to offer a respite from the endless dual grind of de_dust and cs_office, and I would occasionally take the plunge and sully my dad's hard-drive with these bizarre creations.

Of these offerings, the most consistently-populated servers were always devoted to the act of "surfing," a fact that boggled my pre-teen mind. When I would connect, I would see long, sloped ramps to nowhere, curling and twisting through empty space towards an unknown destination. While my opponents seemed to slide across the slope with ease, I would hurtle into the abyss every single time. No matter how loudly I pleaded with my fellow surfers to explain the trick, they would hurl obscenities at me and tell me to use F10 to deploy parachute - a button which would, in fact, abort the game. (To be fair, it was pretty funny the first time.) Later in life, I eventually figured out that holding a movement key against the slope allowed you to stick to the path, and I embraced surfing and other such "trickjumping" as a fun palate-cleanser at the end of a long night of gaming.

Charlie "Mariowned" Joyce is the apparent inventor of the first surf map for Counter-Strike 1.6. Joyce confided this in AskReddit thread where people revealed their "greatest accomplishment" that they can't bring up in normal conversation, and he was immediately mobbed by fans of his work, and surfing in general. "It was pretty overwhelming," he tells me. "I thought I'd just get a couple of people saying, 'hey, I remember surfing, that's cool.' Or maybe, best-case scenario, reconnecting with an old buddy. But it was way, way more than that."

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