Riot Games’ Teamfight Tactics is live in North America

Riot will release its take on Auto Chess, Teamfight Tactics, on its servers for all players Wednesday as part of League of Legends next patch. Update 9.13 brings Teamfight Tactics off the game’s test servers, and adds new Champion, Qiyana.

Riot has been testing Teamfight Tactics on its test realm for the past week — where the game sat comfortably in the top few spots on Twitch — but Wednesday will be the first time North American players can download and try Teamfight Tactics.

Like Auto Chess, players purchase League of Legends units with gold and place them on a hexagonal chess board. After a countdown, one player’s units come to life and battle against another player’s units. Players have no control over their troops during the fight; if their units die, that player will lose health based on how well their opponent’s team performed.

When the fight is over, the board will reset, all pieces come back to life, and players can rearrange them. During the game, players buy more units, upgrade existing units, and increase the amount of units they can put out at once.

To download Teamfight Tactics, players need a League of Legends account. After signing up and downloading the client, players can jump into their first Teamfight Tactics match — no League of Legends play required. On their new website, Riot clarified that players can simply say they’re only interested in Teamfight Tactics when they sign in.

Riot will eventually add a ranked mode to Teamfight Tactics, similar to its ranked feature for League of Legends. The Teamfight Tactics missions, where players can earn cosmetics, won’t launch until next week to ensure the feature works properly. For server stability, Riot plans to increase queue times for the first few days.

The game mode will roll out Tuesday in Oceania and Japan, with a restriction that players under account level 10 can’t play Teamfight Tactics. Starting Wednesday, June 26, Riot will remove the level 10 restriction and players in North America, Russia, Turkey, and both European servers can start playing Teamfight Tactics. Riot will add Teamfight Tactics to the rest of the League of Legends servers by the end of the week.

Update 6/26: On Wednesday morning, Riot Games released the new game mode onto the North American League of Legends servers.