Auto Chess

This elimination style game features elements derived from Dota 2. Up to eight players are assigned to their own chessboard upon which their "home" battles are fought. Each player controls a character called a courier, which tracks the player's health, gold (displayed as the courier's mana), and experience level. At the beginning of every round, an enemy team appears on the player's board (home games) and the player's team appears on an enemy's board (away games). The teams fight in an automatically generated battle over which the player has no direct control, hence Auto.

Players create a team of pieces which are randomly drawn and purchased from a shared pool of over fifty distinct Dota 2 heroes, each with its own statistics, abilities, and persona. Three of the same piece combine to form a 2-star piece, and three 2-star pieces combine to form a 3-star piece. Each piece also belongs to a class and at least one particular race. Assembling a sufficient number of pieces in a race or class grants a "synergy" which increases the power of either a certain group of pieces or a player's entire team.

When asked about the inspiration of Dota Auto Chess shortly following the mod's release, Drodo Studio stated that they drew inspiration from the Chinese tile-based game Mahjong for reference. Generally played by four people, the objective of Mahjong is to spell out a particular combination of cards through a series of replacement and trade-off rules while preventing opponents from achieving their own combinations. The game focuses on technique, strategy and calculation, but also relies on luck. While drawing inspiration from Mahjong, Dota Auto Chess made changes to accommodate the battle-oriented gameplay. The game also drew inspiration from a popular mod for WarCraft III called Pokemon Defense.

Dota Auto Chess was released by Drodo Studio to the Steam Marketplace on January 4, 2019. Since its release, Drodo Studio has updated the game with game balance adjustments, bug fixes and new content updates. The content updates include adding and removing pieces, as well as adding new synergies to the game. With the viral surge of popularity of the mod, Valve, the developer of Dota 2, flew Drodo Studio to their headquarters, to discuss recruiting them for developing a standalone version of Dota Auto Chess.

The game had over 8.5 million subscribers by May 2019, with more than 300,000 active players daily. A tournament was held in early March 2019. Several publications praised Dota Auto Chess for its creative gameplay rules accessibility. VPEsports noted that Dota Auto Chess feels like a very strategic game: "It's a strategy game, with a feeling of a turn-based game, it has the key ingredients of card games and it requires the player to plan ahead while being rather good with APM."

Game Informer offered the praise that "It's not chess, and it's not Dota, but it's a great game to queue up and play with friends or solo." "It takes a few games to start to understand how everything works, but its got some really fun strategy hooks underneath everything." PCGamesN called Dota Auto Chess "the most successful third party Dota custom game ever".