Editorial note: Hey! Instead of dumping an absolute truckload of text on you, we decided to split this story into two-parts. The second part will be available tomorrow, 4/3, at 10:00am PT.

“Hey, have you tried Auto Chess?” There was no escaping this question at Riot in the first few months of 2019—either you were talking Auto Chess, or you risked being “ok boomer”ed by your team.



It didn’t take long for that question to become, “Wait, why don’t we make something like this?” We thought it was worth a try, but it needed to be done quickly because there was no way we were the only ones thinking this could be a big deal. Still, it didn’t make sense to take a bunch of League’s devs off their projects to pursue something we weren’t 100% sure about. So we kept the team small. Twelve people small.

Since we didn’t want to risk being left behind, we gave ourselves an... aggressive timeline. Eighteen weeks. Eight to see if we could make something fun and ten to actually do it. That left us with two questions: How do we even? And who’s dumb enough to try?

The devs you’ll be hearing from (who are just a small part of the initial TFT team):