The Lore of Chess Rush: Flamecaller

So this is something I've been meaning to link to for a while now.  Last year, I really became a fan of the auto battler genre of video games (sometimes called auto chess after its first major representative).  As I've mused previously, it's really hard to pin down exactly what it is about these games that's so addictive...but man do I love them.

Three of the genre's heavy hitters - Teamfight Tactics, Dota Underlords, and Hearthstone Battlegrounds - are built upon established IP with well-developed universes.  However, my two favorite auto battlers - Auto Chess and Chess Rush - have been building their worlds pretty much from scratch.  I say "pretty much" because their characters, at least initially, were largely tweaked and reskinned versions of the heroes from Dota 2, since it was a mod of that popular game (created by Drodo Studio, the current developers of Auto Chess) that set off the auto battler craze.  (Also, I think the Chess Rush characters - or character models, at least - may be from a previous game by Chinese mega-developer Tencent, but I have no idea how much effort may have been put into making the overall worlds similar...)

Screenshot from Chess Rush

The directions that these games have taken their heroes has granted a lot of opportunity to develop interesting worlds for gaming.  I have often thought that a game might be able to help distinguish itself from the others in this fairly crowded niche by tailoring the experience toward immersion in a fantastic universe.  And aside from that, I just like reading game lore.

So, I decided I'd pester these companies a bit, letting them know I'd like to see more lore and offering my own feeble attempts.  Well, the kind crew at Chess Rush was gracious enough to link to a short story I wrote from their official Facebook page once I posted the story on their subreddit.  So...I am happy to share that I have semi-officially added a bit of lore to the Chess Rush universe with a short story about the hero Flamecaller that you can find, if you're so inclined, right HERE! :)

And...since I'm on a bit of a Light City kick lately, here's Flamecaller for Swords & Wizardry Light...

Flamecaller

Level 3 Magic-User

AC 8[11]    9 HP

STR 10    DEX 15(+1)    CON 11    INT 18(+1)    WIS 7    CHA 16(+1)

Attack:  Dagger +0 (1d6-1 damage)

Spells known: (1) Detect Magic, Light I, Magic Missile; (2) Knock

The Biggest Thing to Happen in Gaming in 2019!

Time for me to reveal the Biggest Thing to Happen in Gaming last year!  For me, that is.  Not for the world at large.  Or...actually, it's somewhere in between.  This is the thing that had an impact on the scene that is gaming (all of it...computers, cards, dice, meeples, rock, paper, scissors...I'm treating it all as one big entity) that also had a big impact on me.

So it isn't something like, "I randomly ran a WEG Star Wars adventure for a couple of friends from work, and it was a blast."  That was a big event for me, but had little impact on gaming as a whole.

It also isn't something like the release of Fantasy Flight Games' Marvel Champions: The Card Game, which looks to be a highly regarded addition to the customizable card game family, with a killer license, awesome production, and lots of fans.  I think it'd be something that's right up my alley.  But...I've never played it.  I think it's big, just not for me.  (Yet, at least.)

Nope, it's somewhere in between those two.  And...it's a tie.

The Biggest Thing(s) to Happen in Gaming in 2019...

1A:  The rise of Oathbreaker

While it had been around for a couple of years, it wasn't until 2019 that most of us in the Magic: The Gathering-playing world heard of Oathbreaker, a variant of the Commander/EDH format that uses a Planeswalker card as the leader of your deck, along with a single "signature spell" that they can cast when on the battlefield.  It uses 60-card decks and 20 life, can easily be played 1v1 or multiplayer, and is flavorful, fun, and often fast enough to be completed over lunch.  The last two years have seen me venture back into MTG after going too many years getting in too few games, and Oathbreaker has really caught my attention as a format of choice.

It gained a lot of steam this year.  (The Planeswalker-themed set War of the Spark surely helped!)  I suppose time will tell if it has the staying power of its "parent" format, but I definitely think there's a possibility it will.

And then there's...

1B:  The rise of auto battlers

When I was much younger, I really enjoyed video games and was often looking to play the next big thing.  However, it has been a very long time since I have been anywhere close to actually playing the next big thing.  Somewhere around the end of the era that people talked about how many bits were in their consoles, my fingers quit understanding the way modern video games worked.  I've always paid some amount of attention to the video game industry and the popular games at the time, but other than digital card games (which I generally love, but whose video-gameyness could be debated), I've rarely played them.

Then came Auto Chess.  Born as a mod for the MOBA Dota 2 (and apparently somewhat based upon an old Warcraft 3 custom map involving battling Pokemon), Auto Chess spawned an entire genre of game (the auto battler) in which players spend round after round building a team to fight one of the other competitors at random until just one is left standing.  I'd try to give more detail into how these games typically function, but whenever I do, it just makes them sound like a weird exercise in resource management and matching like items, which...I guess they kind of are.  I really have very little idea how to explain why these things are so addictive, but I can tell you that as soon as I finish one game, I'm pretty much ready to start the next one to see if a good strategy holds up or if I can improve upon a bad one.

There's a good bit of info out there on the net for these games.  The biggest names in the genre are probably Teamfight Tactics (using League of Legends characters), Dota Underlords (the official Dota entry), Auto Chess (made by the creators of the original Dota mod, and the source of the picture above), and Hearthstone Battlegrounds (a more recent entry that builds on the card game's engine).  I also have a big soft spot in my heart for Chess Rush, with its fantastic Turbo (shorter contest) mode.

For the first time in...decades, probably...I was playing a non-card-based video game that was the buzz of the gaming world.  Although...the genre is arguably about as close to being a card game as a "true" video game can get without actually involving digital cards.  A discussion for another time, I suppose.

Happy New Year, everyone...here's to an awesome 2020!

The 8-bit origins of Auto Chess

Hi internet!  I made a thing.

'Tis a wee thing, but a thing nonetheless.  And while I haven't posted anything here in...quite a long time...it seemed to me that there may be some overlap between folks who might enjoy seeing said thing and those who would be aware that I posted something here (I posted it over on Reddit, but that's obviously much less satisfying than a blog post...).

So...I've developed an obsession with Auto Chess as I have for very few other games over the years, and I eventually started thinking about how fun it would be to have a version of the game (or an auto battler in general) in a retro gaming style.  Since I don't know what the odds are of that ever happening, I doodled this together to at least see what it would look like.  And...you never know...maybe some indie developer and fellow lover of Auto Chess sees this image at some point and decides to make it happen...

And...that's it!  It ain't much, but it was fun.  I'm hoping to keep playing with this over time to maybe produce some more compelling images...

EDIT 09/14/2019:  I see that this post has actually gotten a few views and don't know what the chances are that anyone who's seen it is at all familiar with Auto Chess.  So, I figured I'd post a screenshot of the mobile game.

(It's a very good mobile game, by the way.)