Angband is a free, single-player roguelike dungeon-exploration game in which you guide an adventurer from a small trading town down through a 100-level dungeon to a final confrontation with Morgoth, the Lord of Darkness. First written in 1990 and continuously developed by a community of volunteers ever since, it is one of the longest-running open-source games in existence and a direct descendant of Rogue, Hack and Moria. Levels are rebuilt every time you enter them, death is permanent, and every item has to be discovered and identified — the classic roguelike formula at its most complete.

Key Features

• 100 procedurally generated dungeon levels — caverns, vaults and monster pits rebuilt each time you visit, with the small town above the dungeon as a safe base for shopping and resting.
• Hundreds of monsters and unique bosses — from rats and orcs on the upper levels down to dragons, greater demons and the named uniques, with Sauron and finally Morgoth waiting at the bottom.
• Deep item and identification system — weapons, armour, rings, amulets, scrolls, potions, wands and staves that must be identified and lore-checked before you dare rely on them.
• Character building — choose a race and class (Warrior, Mage, Priest, Rogue, Ranger, Paladin, Druid, Necromancer and others) and develop melee, spells, stealth and resistances as the character grows.
• Classic ASCII display with optional graphics — play in pure text mode, or switch on one of the bundled graphical tilesets if ASCII is not your style.
• Runs anywhere — Windows, macOS and Linux/Unix, plus a browser client at angband.live where you can play, spectate other games or chat with other players.
• Variants and an active community — decades of forks and variants, a busy forum, and a character ladder for uploading and comparing character sheets.

Why Use It

Angband is turn-based, so it runs on any hardware and never punishes you for thinking slowly — one keypress is one action, with no twitch reflexes involved. It is GPL-licensed, ad-free and telemetry-free, plays entirely offline, and rewards long-term planning: every death teaches you something about the dungeon. Because the game is data-driven, variants and mods are unusually easy to build on top of it.

Use Cases

• Classic roguelike fans who want the deepest and longest-running entry in the genre.
• Playing on low-spec, headless or terminal-only machines.
• Offline gaming with no accounts, stores, ads or network dependency.
• Exploring and modifying a mature open-source C codebase with a data-driven content system.

Platforms

Windows, macOS and Linux/Unix, with BSD ports available. The current release is 4.2.6 (December 2025); source code and pre-built binaries are published on the project’s GitHub releases page, and most Linux distributions ship an angband package.

Licence

Free and open source — GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPL-2.0-or-later). The game code, data files and graphics are all open; the featured image is a GPL-licensed screenshot from Wikimedia Commons showing the graphical tileset.

Alternatives

• Crossfire — a free, open-source (GPL) cooperative multiplayer roguelike RPG if you would rather adventure with other players.

Website

rephial.org — official home of Angband, with downloads, documentation links, the forum and the ladder. Source code: github.com/angband/angband.