Sil-Q

About the game

Sil-Q is a roguelike in the Angband tradition that tries to take away the parts of the genre that feel like bookkeeping. The game's own introduction sets the scene: the world is young, you have travelled far into the north to reach Angband, and you plan to descend a thousand feet into the earth, find the dark enemy Morgoth and cut a Silmaril from his crown. The setting is the First Age of Middle-earth, and the dungeon, its creatures and its names follow from it.

The project describes itself as a game with a strong emphasis on discovery and tactical combat, with a simple but rich combat system that allows a great variety of choice. You do not gain levels from killing things. Instead you start with a pool of experience points and spend them on strength, dexterity, constitution and grace, and on abilities for melee, archery, evasion, stealth, perception, will and song, among others. You also choose a race (Noldor, Sindar, Naugrim or Edain), and for some of them a House, each with its own strengths. Songs, smithing and fletchery are part of the toolkit.

Sil-Q continues the development of Sil, which had not been updated for a while, and is built on the code of Angband 3.0.

Playing it here

This is Sil-Q 1.5.0 in its text version, compiled for the browser from the project's source code. The screen is a text terminal drawn on a canvas, and a keyboard is required. The download is about 1 MB and the game plays offline once loaded. We left out the graphical tiles and the sounds, which have other licences, so the game is ASCII only; and the first start of each visit takes a few seconds, because the game builds its data files from the text files.

Press Ctrl+X to save and quit. Saved characters, and the list of past heroes, stay in this browser: next time, choose "Open saved character" and type the character's name. Clearing this site's data deletes them. The game is in English.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Start with the tutorial. The first menu offers a short tutorial level that teaches the basics; it is the best way to learn how moving, fighting and resting work in this game.

Spend your experience with a plan. Read each ability's description before you choose, and favour a few connected skills over many small ones.

Think about each fight. Combat in Sil-Q is not about waiting for a lucky roll. Position, stealth and the choice of attack matter, and sometimes the better choice is to avoid the fight.