League Of Legends’ ‘Teamfight Tactics’ Auto Chess Spin-Off Has A Massive First Day On Twitch

Don’t look now, but the next gaming craze may have arrived. That would be auto chess, a new genre from where else, a DOTA 2 mod originally released by Drodo Studio in January 2019, and one that has just seen a major release in the form of Riot Games trying to get in on the action with their own spin, Teamfight Tactics.

Auto chess has skyrocketed in popularity as of late, particularly in China, but it’s starting to become more and more mainstream, and with Teamfight Tactics being the number one game on Twitch yesterday with 200,000+ viewers, it seems that day has come.

Auto chess looks more complicated than it is, but essentially players pick out different characters with abilities and place them on a board where at the end of a turn, they auto-fight one another as the player sits and watches. It’s not action-based, it’s all strategy, as you have to manage tactics with resources (gold and XP gain) in order to beat other players or AI foes.

I first heard of auto chess when many of the old Hearthstone pros had moved on to DOTA Auto Chess after growing bored of Blizzard’s card game, and many of them, from Disguised Toast to Kripp were among the most viewed players giving Teamfight Tactics a shot yesterday, though I also saw a number of League of Legends pros up there as well. This is poor timing for original DOTA Auto Chess developer Drodo, who announced barely a week ago that it would be developing Auto Chess as a standalone PC game for release on the Epic Games Store, but Riot has already beaten them to the punch, moving surprisingly quickly in a way that Riot rarely has in the past.

The move was an easy decision for Riot which, like Valve’s DOTA, has dozens of potential characters ready for use in a game like this, and you’ll find a huge chunk of the League roster in Teamfight Tactics already with more to come. If Blizzard was smart they would have made it to market with their own auto chess featuring their collection of heroes, but Blizzard has not exactly been firing on all cylinders lately, and I’m not going to hold my breath for Heroes of Auto Chess any time soon.

So far, Teamfight Tactics seems like a pretty solid entry for something that was no doubt developed in just a few months by a company not exactly known for…well, really anything other than continuing to iterate on a single, massive game. The entire genre has yet to prove itself to be here for the long term, but the arrival of Teamfight Tactics feels like it’s only amplifying it, and this could be the beginning of something even larger than what we’ve seen to this point.

"We don't even know if it has legs," Richard Henkel, product manager of Teamfight Tactics told Usgamer. "It could be in 12 months, maybe it's gone. We think that it has longevity, so we wanted to give it our best shot, especially early on, as this is a new thing."

You can play Teamfight Tactics from the League of Legends client itself, and it is, of course, free. See if it’s for you.