Auto Chess

Introduction

Every auto battler on the market today, including the ones with much bigger budgets and much cleaner interfaces, owes its existence to a Dota 2 custom map called Auto Chess that Drodo Studio released in January 2019. It hit eight million players within five months, invented a genre almost overnight, and forced Valve, Riot, and half the industry to build their own versions of it. This Steam release — developed with Dragonest Co., Ltd and published under the storefront name Chengdu longyuan Network Technology Co.Ltd — is Drodo's own standalone follow-up, arriving on PC in December 2022 after first launching on mobile. It carries the genre's founding pedigree directly, which is a rarer claim than it sounds given how crowded the auto battler shelf has become since.

That pedigree is also the most interesting thing about reviewing it in 2026: this isn't a game trying to catch up to Teamfight Tactics or Dota Underlords. It's the game those were built to compete with. Whether that history is enough to carry a rough, ad-cluttered mobile port on PC is the actual question.

The strategy still works

The core loop is the one the genre is named for. Eight players draft and reposition hero cards between rounds, watch AI-controlled battles resolve automatically, and try to build a formation that beats the field rather than any single opponent. Auto Chess's version spreads that decision space across 22 races and 13 classes, and the overlapping bonuses between them — stacking a race trait against a class trait, then reshaping the whole board when a stronger combination becomes available — is where the game earns its player base's loyalty. Reviewers who've stuck with it across multiple seasons consistently point to the synergy system as the reason they're still playing years later, and it's easy to see why: there's a genuine difference between building toward a plan and reacting to what the shared card pool gives you, and Auto Chess's economy is generous enough to reward both approaches.

The co-op Team Battles variant is the format's best-received addition, letting players pair up rather than compete purely free-for-all, and it shows up in player feedback as one of the few areas with no serious complaints attached. It's a good sign that when this team adds new modes on top of the base formula, they still know how to design one.

A mobile game wearing a PC skin

The problems start the moment you open it. This is, by its own player base's account, an unmodified mobile UI stretched onto a desktop window — menu density built for a thumb and a 6-inch screen, stacked pop-ups for chests, mail and battle pass prompts before you can queue for a match, and in some cases a forced secondary account creation step just to log in. None of that is unusual for a mobile-to-PC port done cheaply, but it's a consistently repeated frustration in reviews specifically from players comparing this release to the PC-native experience the original mod offered.

Performance complaints follow the same pattern: rendering glitches during the combat phase that reviewers describe as "fireworks" of visual noise, general instability, and default audio loud enough that muting it in settings doesn't survive a fresh launch. None of this is fatal to the strategy layer underneath, but it's friction stacked on friction before you get anywhere near the part of the game that's actually good.

The economy, and who's still playing

Auto Chess is free, and its monetisation runs on a chest-and-key system layered under a battle pass — biscuits and chests as the base currency, keys and a separate premium currency to open them, and a further currency loop for buying and reselling cosmetic boards and piece skins. None of it blocks the core competitive loop directly, and the cosmetic-only items give spenders and free players a reasonable middle ground. What draws the sharpest criticism is the sheer number of overlapping currencies and gates between a player and the content they want, which more than one reviewer summed up as a genuinely good game being run by a company more interested in the economy than the game.

That criticism matters more than usual here because of population health. A live check of Steam's concurrent player counter puts Auto Chess at roughly 180 players at time of writing — thin for any online game, and a real structural risk for one whose entire format depends on filling an 8-player lobby quickly. Older reviews describe queue times stretching past an hour in past seasons before recovering; current reviews are split between "queues are usually short" and frustration that ranked matches are increasingly populated by suspected cheaters exploiting gold or item exploits. A thinning, less-monitored population is exactly the condition under which both of those problems get worse, not better.

Final verdict

Auto Chess deserves credit that's easy to overlook once a genre matures: this is the team that built the format everyone else is still iterating on, and the synergy system they've kept refining across seasons remains genuinely satisfying strategy. That's not nothing, and it's the reason the game still has a dedicated, multi-year player base willing to overlook a lot to keep playing it.

But "willing to overlook a lot" is doing real work in that sentence. The Steam release is a mobile port that never bothered to redesign itself for the platform it landed on, its economy is dense enough that even fans call the company out for it directly, and a shrinking concurrent population threatens the one thing an auto battler cannot function without: a full lobby, quickly. It settles at a six because the strategic core is a genuine 8, and everything wrapped around it drags that number down hard.

Price and store data checked 11 August 2026.

If you'd rather your strategy game didn't come wrapped in a currency you need a spreadsheet to track, Wanderer keeps its economy a lot simpler.