Angband

About the game

Angband is one of the oldest and most respected roguelikes. You make a character, buy gear in a small town and take the stairs down into a dungeon whose levels are each built at random when you arrive. Deep below, around level 100, waits Morgoth, the Lord of Darkness; before him come stronger monsters, stranger magic and a lot of ways to die. When a character dies, it is gone for good, and you start again with another one.

Time passes only when you act, so you can stop and think about every move. That makes the game slow and careful rather than fast: you read what you find, learn what each potion and scroll does by trying it, choose when to fight and when to run, and slowly build a character that can survive deeper. The monsters, items and levels come from Tolkien's Middle-earth stories, and the screen is plain text: a letter is a monster, a symbol is an item, and dots and hash marks are floors and walls.

This is version 4.2.5 of the game, from the Angband team's own repository. There are eleven races and nine classes, from the sturdy warrior to the necromancer who fights in the dark, and each plays differently. The game has a full in-game help, a character sheet that tracks everything and a knowledge menu that remembers what you have learned.

Playing it here

The download is about 8 MB. The game opens with a title screen and then walks you through making a character: pick a race, a class and how to roll the stats (the point-based option is the recommended one), and accept the rest. Then you arrive in the town. The number keys on the map are shops (1 is the General Store, where food, torches and flasks of oil are sold); walk onto a number to go in. When you are ready, go to the down staircase and press >.

Your character is saved in this browser. Press Ctrl-S to save at any time, and the game picks your character up again the next time you open the page. Clearing the site data deletes it.

The game is shown in text characters. Some of the graphical tilesets that come with Angband, by Adam Bolt and by David Gervais, are included and can be chosen from the Menu at the top of the window; the Gervais tiles are used with credit to their author, David Gervais. The Shockbolt tileset and the game's sound effects are not part of this version, since their terms do not allow commercial use or use outside Angband.

Controls

Angband uses the keyboard for everything. The most useful keys, in the default key set:

In the options (the = key) you can switch to the roguelike key set.

Tips

Buy before you dive. Spend your gold in town on Flasks of oil to throw, a Potion of Cure Light Wounds or two and a few days of food before the first descent.

Fight in corridors. Groups of monsters can surround you in a room, but only one or two can reach you in a corridor.

Run when the fight turns. Retreating up the stairs is a sound tactic in Angband, and a new level is built whenever you take them.

Read the help. It covers the whole game, from the keys to the way each class works, and a few minutes with it pays off quickly.

FAQ

Can I move with the mouse? The game accepts mouse clicks to walk, but the keyboard is how it is meant to be played.

What happens when my character dies? It is gone. The game records the death in the character sheet and lets you start a new one.

Credits

Angband is made by the Angband Development Team, building on the game by Robert Koeneke and James E. Wilson; the long list of contributors is in the game's own credits. The 32 by 32 tiles are by David Gervais, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence, and the 16 by 16 tiles are by Adam Bolt. The game's fonts are by Leon Marrick, Sheldon Simms III and Nick McConnell. The full licence texts are in the game's licence file.