'Super Auto Pets' is an awesome (and extra cute) intro to auto battlers

engadget.com:

It's not often a brand new genre of game comes around. And while battle royale-style titles like PUBG and Fortnite have gotten a ton of attention and countless clones in recent years, there's another new type of game — especially for fans of strategy and tactics games — that deserves your attention: auto battlers.

Now before anyone gets hysterical about auto battlers already having been around for some time, let's get one thing clear. While the genre can trace its lineage back to Warcraft 3 mods like Pokemon Defense, the category as a whole didn't really get mainstream attention until 2019 thanks to titles like Dota Autochess (which is now just Autochess), Teamfight Tactics, Hearthstone's Battlegrounds and Dota Underlords.

However, since those games have characters and abilities based on existing titles (e.g. Dota and League of Legends), their counterpart auto battlers are kind of intimidating for new players to pick up. I know because, despite it becoming one of her favorite games as of late, I played Teamfight Tactics for almost a year on my own before successfully convincing my wife to give it a shot. And on PC, both Teamfight Tactics and Battlegrounds are only available within the launcher for their parent games. That makes them seem more like expansions rather than a brand new game type, which is admittedly somewhat confusing. But that's where Super Auto Pets comes in.

By taking the basic auto battler formula and then adding a roster of cute, cuddly animals, Super Auto Pets has become the perfect intro to the genre, while still being surprisingly deep. The game's general mechanics are simple. Every turn you start with 10 gold. You then use the gold to buy pets or food for three gold each (or one gold in the case of the