Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead — the absolute best roguelikes around.
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The first has a very focused philosophy of removing all tedious and spoilery game mechanics, optimal strategies and no-brainers from the game. Some hate that, I love it. DCSS is the anti-Nethack. You can play online on your browser, with graphical tiles, spectators and even information bots for all your queries.
The second has an extremely passionate and vibrant community of contributors, and they're adding everything and the kitchen sink. Blink and a whole subsystem will have been merged into master. I reckon CDDA will be the first universe-scale quantum simulator, a couple years before the entire humanity will transfer its consciousness inside a Dwarf Fortress world.
CDDA is certainly a much more enjoyable game than Dwarf Fortress, but I have to admire the audacity of something that attempts to simulate thousands of years of history in a world, which you can step into any time, alongside the social structures of entire civilisations. Perhaps the only thing more amazing than DF's scope is the fact that it exists.
I loved playing CDDA in ASCII mode, but Dwarf Fortress is absolutely impenetrable to me, so I never had the chance to dive in properly. I'm waiting for the graphical version to be released, the screenshots I've seen of the new UI are incredible, I can't wait to buy it when it's out.
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The first has a very focused philosophy of removing all tedious and spoilery game mechanics, optimal strategies and no-brainers from the game. Some hate that, I love it. DCSS is the anti-Nethack. You can play online on your browser, with graphical tiles, spectators and even information bots for all your queries.
https://crawl.develz.org/
The second has an extremely passionate and vibrant community of contributors, and they're adding everything and the kitchen sink. Blink and a whole subsystem will have been merged into master. I reckon CDDA will be the first universe-scale quantum simulator, a couple years before the entire humanity will transfer its consciousness inside a Dwarf Fortress world.
https://cataclysmdda.org/