Agents of Chaosa new autobattler royale game from Magic: The Gathering designer Richard Garfield, launched its private alpha test today.

The game is from the startup studio Popular there has been a lot of interest since its announcement at Gen Con 2024. More than 20,000 players have signed up for 1,000 seats in the alpha test. To meet demand, Popularium will increase the number of alpha seats to 5,000 for the initial launch of the alpha, and it plans to expand the Alpha beyond 10,000 players in early 2025.

“We have been overwhelmed by the response to the Alpha announcement,” said Arka Ray, president and CTO of Popularium, in a statement. “The number of players who wanted to join the alpha and experience Richard’s vision was more than 20 times what we expected. And we continue to get hundreds of new applications every week. We expect more than 30 thousand applicants by the end of the year. The team is working over the holidays to accommodate as many players as possible in this early Alpha phase. We want every applicant to have the opportunity to experience Chaos Agents as soon as possible.

To prepare for this rapid expansion, Popularium launched an equity crowdfunding campaign on the Republic platform. The campaign was completely executed and then oversubscribed within six hours of the public launch.

Republic’s Popularium campaign allows members of the public to invest in Popularium. Ray attributed the rapid closing of the campaign to the players and fans of Popularium cofounders Garfield and Jonathan Bankard (co-creators of Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Command and Conquer) who wanted to directly support the development of their next original game.

“This is an exciting time for Chaos Agents,” Garfield said in a community Q&A on the occasion of the launch of the Chaos Agents alpha and Republic’s crowdfunding campaign. “The game was well received by the players, much more than I expected for the first episode. There are many different types of game modes that we want to build into Chaos Agents, and thanks to the community and the technology we built, it became clear what we could and should build. There is no more exciting time for the development of a game when the players are clearly enjoying it, but at the same time the opportunities for -progress it seems there is no end.

Endless multiplayer game

The Alpha Launch follows the announcement that Popularium has committed to the “forever multiplayer game” model for Chaos Agents. By using dedicated servers and the proprietary Chaos cloud gaming engine, Popularium plans to ensure that Chaos Agents becomes a multiplayer game that “can’t be killed” or taken offline.

Players are expected to always have a way to play the game with the unique superheroes around the world that they have recruited to their team. Garfield and Ray attributed the positive response from this announcement to helping generate more interest in the Chaos Agents Alpha and crowdfunding campaign.

In Chaos Agents, the first game in the “autobattler-royale” genre, players coach and guide a unique superhero around the world – their Chaos Agent – to victory in a grand battle royale against dozens to other Agents.

The player coaches and moves their hero through a deep, strategic card game similar to Garfield’s legendary games, such as Magic and Keyforge, and then sits back and watches as their agent goes into battle, preparing for the next phase of the upgrade. Each Agent is globally unique – meaning that only one player in the world can play an Agent at a time and become a global expert on that agent.

“Evolving and creating new genres is a lot of fun,” said Bankard, game director for Chaos Agents, in a statement. “All of us at Popularium have worked on projects like Magic and Hearthstone that started as small dreams that affected more players than we initially expected. We’re trying something similar to Chaos Agents–to bring the autobattler genre of games to more people through the proven battle royale format. The advantage we have now is the early involvement of our community in helping us polish this uncut gem into a you bright, shining diamonds through their game and now investments that will allow them to own a piece of Popularium.

Chaos Agents plans to expand its alpha in late January with the Second Chaos World Championship, and plans to expand alpha capacity each month before entering Early Access in late 2025. Players can sign up for in alpha on popularium.com and request priority access by joining the
Chaos Agents Discord server.