Valve Announces Underlords, a Standalone Chess Clone for Steam, Android, and iOS

This week game developer Valve announced the game Underlords which is their version of the popular Auto Chess mod for Dota 2. Underlords is a standalone game for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android. According to Valve, a "friends and family" beta of the game has been "running" for the past few weeks and will expand today for all Dota 2 Battle Bass users. A free open beta of stress tests will also be released a week later.

Underlords is being Valve's second flagship title in the Dota 2 portfolio after the release of the game Artifact in the year 2018 which was met with poor reviews. Auto Chess, unlike Artifact, already has a strong following, including users who work at Valve. Company employees say they "have spent much of the last six months playing the game." Like Auto Chess, the game Underlords will have the possibility of seven players fighting each other with a system of turns. According to information from Valve, Underlords would be the opposite of Dota 2: "Victory is determined not by twitch reflexes, but by superior tactics."

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A few weeks ago it was announced by the digital games publisher that it would be working on a game of its own that would be a clone of the game Auto Chess after making an unsuccessful attempt to get the attention of the game's developer, Drodo.

We had great conversations, but we both came to the conclusion that Valve and Drodo couldn't work directly with each other for a variety of reasons.

This is of course due, though not mentioned, to the fact that Auto Chess is now an Epic Games exclusive and is an important piece in Epic's war against Valve.

For those unfamiliar with the link between the games, Underlords is a standalone version of Auto Chess, which is a Dota 2 mod, which is a sequel to Dota, which is a Warcraft 3 mod (developed by Blizzard).