Auto Chess, the popular unofficial minigame created within Valve’s Dota 2 is being made as a standalone title.

The game was originally created by a group of modders (now known as Drodo) within Dota 2 and gained success. Now, Valve are creating a standalone version of Dota Auto Chess with the blessing of Drodo, who were flown from China to the offices of Valve in Washington to meet with the team and discuss a potential collaboration between the two studios, which resulted in “agreeing that we’ll each build our own stand-alone version of the game, and support each other to the fullest”.

This doesn’t mark the end of auto chess within Dota though. The team have promised to continue working on the mod, and are preparing to launch their own spin on mobile devices which you can check out here.

It should also be noted that Valve have confirmed they have a selection of titles in the pipelines, possibly to do with their latest project the Valve Index – a new headset with No Man’s Sky being one of the headliners (and an incentive) to buy the headset, but it’s likely we’ll see some first party titles at launch.