Popularium is releasing an alpha for Chaos Agents from Magic creator Richard Garfield

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

The game 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 spots 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 plans to expand the Alpha to over 10,000 players in early 2025.

“We’ve been blown away by the response to the Alpha announcement,” said Arca Ray, Popularium’s president and CTO, in a statement. “The number of players who want to join the alpha and experience Richard’s vision is over 20 times more than we expected. And we continue to receive hundreds of new applications every week. We expect over 30,000 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 stage. We want every applicant to have the opportunity to experience Chaos Agents as soon as possible.”

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

Republic’s Popularium campaign enables members of the public to invest in Popularium. Ray attributed the quick completion of the campaign to the players and fans of Popularium co-founders Garfield and Jonathan Bankard (creator of Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Command and Conquer) wanting to directly support the development of their next original game.

“It’s an exciting time for Chaos Agents,” Garfield said in a community Q&A on the launch of the Chaos Agents alpha and Republic crowdfunding campaign. “The game is being received really well by players, much more than I expected at this early stage. There are so many different types of game modes we want to build into Chaos Agents, and thanks to the community and technology we’ve built, it’s clear what we can and should build. There is no more exciting time to develop a game when players are clearly enjoying themselves, but at the same time the possibilities for improvement seem endless.”

Forever multiplayer game

The Alpha launch follows the announcement that Popularium has committed to the “perpetual multiplayer” model for Chaos Agents. Through the use of dedicated servers and its proprietary Chaos cloud game engine, Popularium plans to ensure that Chaos Agents will be 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 globally unique superheroes they have recruited into their team. Garfield and Ray credit the positive response from this announcement as helping to generate additional interest in Chaos Agents Alpha and the crowdfunding campaign.

In Chaos Agents, the first game in the autobattler-royale genre, players train and guide a globally unique superhero – their Chaos Agent – ​​to victory in a spectacular battle royale against dozens of other agents.

The player trains and empowers their character through a deep, strategic card game similar to Garfield’s legendary games like Magic and Keyforge, then sits back and watches their agent go into battle, preparing for the next round of upgrades. Each agent is globally unique – meaning that only one player in the world will be able to play an agent at a time and become a global expert on that agent.

“Developing and creating new genres is so much fun,” Bankard, game director for Chaos Agents, said in a statement. “All of us at Popularium have worked on projects like Magic and Hearthstone that started as small dreams that ended up impacting far more players than we originally hoped. We’re trying something similar with Chaos Agents – to bring the autobattler genre to many more people through the proven format of Battle Royales. The advantage we now have is the early involvement of our community to help us polish this rough gem into a brilliant, shining diamond through their play and now investment that allows them to own a piece of Popularium.”

Chaos Agents plans to expand its alpha release at the end of January in conjunction with the Second Chaos World Championship, and plans to expand alpha capacity every month before entering early access in late 2025. Players can sign up for the alpha on popularium.com and request priority access by joining
Chaos Agents Discord server.