People have been making weird and wonderful custom Dota 2 games for years. With so much good stuff coming from outside the dota-sphere, that’s easy to forget – but not when a possible bug convinces the internet you’ve got more players than Grand Theft Auto V.
That seems have happened with Dota Auto Chess, a custom game where you pit teams of increasingly powerful wizards against seven opponents. Even with that bug in mind, it’s still throbbing with players – popularity made me notice it, but quality kept me playing. For half a game, at least, until I got crushed by the people who knew what they were doing.
A Dota 2 custom game mode designed by China-based Drodo Studio is taking the Dota 2 world by storm, reaching 100,000 concurrent players earlier today and racking up over 670,000 subscribed users. Dota Auto Chess is a strategic, tactically complex mix of board game and Dota custom map. Play is based around drafting hands of heroes, combining them to upgrade them, and then deploying them correctly to win victories over eight other players in a series of one-on-one matches. The game has become wildly popular, with more concurrent players today than, say, Grand Theft Auto 5 or Football Manager 2019. Like Dota 2, Dota Auto Chess is completely free.
Dota Auto Chess is a weird name for it, I’ll grant. That makes sense since it’s cross-cultural, but the game doesn’t really have that much to do with a match of chess other than an 8x8 board. In truth, it inherits more from tactical board games like Neuroshima Hex or Warcraft 3 mods like Legion TD and Hero Line Wars.
Each round of the game you’re drafted a random hand of heroes you can buy using gold you’ve accumulated. Those heroes are then deployed to the grid and fight automated battles against each other. If you buy three of a specific hero, like Axe the Orc Warrior, you can combine them into a more powerful version of that hero. If you own three of a hero type, you get a bonus to that hero type—three warriors nets you +8 armor, for example. Each hero also has a race, with three of a race getting a bonus—so three Orcs nets you +250 health for all Orcs.
Did I mention that the draft is timed? It’s timed. You have 30 seconds to buy and combine, and you need to watch what enemies are drafting because there are only 20 of each hero available in the whole game. If others pull and buy the pieces of your combo from the pool before you then you're out of luck.
See where this gets complex? You’re simultaneously trying to beat enemies as cheaply as possible to save gold for later rounds while you build up combos and counter-combo what your enemies are doing. Got enemies with lots of stuns? Well, maybe you should aim for some Nagas and get stun resistance.
It’s a fascinating game, and rounds play so quickly that you can’t help but keep playing more of the game’s mini-tournaments. You don’t have to be great at Dota 2 to win, because the game automatically fights for you using the heroes you’ve deployed. Lose once from a bad hand? Well, just jump into another match and go for it again. Fights against neutral creeps break up the fights with players and net you bonus gold, so the pressure isn’t always completely on.
Here’s a bit of an explainer from Team Secret Operations Director Matthew Bailey:
You can find Dota Auto Chess here on Steam, or in-game in Dota 2's workshop.
It’s Christmas Frostivus in Dota-land, but Rubick doesn’t care. “Swept up in the zeal of unraveling and reshaping arcane energies” – we’ve all been there – “Grand Magus Rubick marches a mob into Frosthaven, intent on uprooting the original Frostivus tree to explore the mysterious font of power beneath it.” Which means, of course, that five heroes have to defend a Christmas tree in co-op wave survival.
I’ve had a go! It’s better than usual. Mostly because of the bonus round where you get to ride penguins.
We have an odd relationship with gambling in the UK. You'd be hard-pressed to find a high street or city centre that doesn't have at least a couple of bookmakers' shops mixed into it, offering bets on everything from horse racing and football to whether or not Kate Winslet will cry if she wins an Oscar (yes that was a real thing). But how does esports fit in?
According to a recent study by the UK's Gambling Commission, the percentage of British adults who have at some point in their lives placed a bet on esports is 8.5 per cent, with three per cent having placed those bets in the month the study was conducted. That's a surprising statistic for a sport many consider to be still quite niche. And it makes sense most of those bets will be online, given the nature of esports and the audience for it. But it also got me wondering: just how easy it is to walk into a betting shop and wager some cash on an esports event?
To find out, I picked three (at the time of betting) upcoming and current events to bet on, with the intention of gambling on three specific teams to win either the tournament or a particular match. These were Team Liquid to win the ESL One Dota 2 tournament, Ninjas in Pyjamas to win that day's ECS CS:GO season six game, and for the Overwatch World Cup, I had to back the home nation and bet on the UK. Secondly, I decided I had to be able to place the bet in store. We all know you can bet on esports online, so that didn't count.