Rogue variants

Group Description

Games deriving gameplay and appearance from the 1980 mainframe game Rogue, later published for home microcomputers by Epyx and inspiring a long legacy of Hack derivatives etc.

While there are some debates as to what constitutes a Rogue-like, the following to features are considered crucial among the community:

1. Dungeon crawl with randomized dungeons, where maps, items and monsters are generated anew with each new game.
2. Perma-Death: You have only one save game, and it is deleted upon death. If you die, you have to start a new game.

The following additional features are also often found in rogue-likes, especially traditional ones.

1. Turn-based game play, especially single-action-per-turn.
2. Single-character game.
3. 2D top-down ASCII text graphics, with text symbols representing players, monsters, items, walls etc. (Modern rogue-likes give you the opportunity to replace them by graphical 2D tile sets or even isometric graphics.)
4. Rogue-like games are traditionally freeware, and often open source.

These features are not necessarily required to be included in the game, but at least two or more of them should be present.

A bordering case that is hotly disputed in the Roguelike community is Diablo, a commercial game which was inspired by Roguelikes, but added real-time game-play and isometric graphics. This game should not be added here as it only has one of these additional features (single character play); also perma-death is not implemented here (but optionally added as "Hardcore mode" in Diablo II).