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Auto Chess has quietly left early access on PC

The 'OG' auto chess game has released into 1.0 and nobody told us

Auto Chess

Do you remember Auto Chess? The game that launched a new sub-genre of surprisingly addictive strategy games is still going strong, though it has perhaps been outshone by newer arrivals such as Teamfight Tactics and Dota Underlords. The auto chess craze (I’m not saying autobattler, you can’t make me) in general has also petered out, but the big four (to include Hearthstone’s Battlegrounds mode) that are defining the space are still chugging away in their own respective corners of the internet.

Auto Chess was quickly picked up by Epic to be an Epic Games Store exclusive for the standalone PC version, a move that was announced at E3 2019 with the beta launch taking place later that year. It turns out that, as of October 28, 2020, the game is now out of early access.

As far as we can tell, the developer’s have not really announced it this fact however. If you go to Auto Chess’ official website, the news section is filled with rather mundane patch notes and something about the PS4 version being delayed. No mention at all regarding this important milestone.

Even Epic seems a tad confused as to what’s going on. We reached out to the company for clarification, but it took a while for our contact to get back to us because they were waiting for the developers to submit an update talking about the release, which they’ve still yet to do. They did confirm though that Auto Chess has left early access.

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But at the time of writing, we can’t really offer any concrete details as to whether anything specifically went into the 1.0 update. The game has evolved a lot since it originally released as a standalone game – new pawns, new synergies, maps and modes, and of course cross-play between PC and mobile to name a few headline changes. Beyond that, it’d be a case of trawling through the patch notes to see what else has happened. The game is still doing its battle pass system, called ‘Chess Pass’, which has just started its eighth season.

Related: The best auto chess games on PC

The original Dota Auto Chess Steam workshop mod still has nearly ten million subscribers as well, and was updated as recently as November. We’ll bring you more details as we find them.

Auto Chess is available for free via the Epic Games Store (and other platforms, if you want).