In early 2019 Dota Auto Chess singlehandedly invented a new genre that every MOBA developer wanted to copy. Auto Chess took the fun characters from MOBAs and put them in a much more approachable, high-level strategy game. It was a breezy time-waster, and you didn’t need hundreds of hours of practice to be good at it. As the Auto Chess designers spun away from the confines of their Dota 2 custom game, Valve built Dota Underlords, Riot launched Teamfight Tactics and Tencent took multiple shots at the target. But if you take away the graphical differences between these games, they’re mostly indistinguishable.Â
