Overview

Brogue is a free, open-source single-player, turn-based roguelike set in a randomly generated dungeon. You descend through 26 levels of the Dungeons of Doom to retrieve the fabled Amulet of Yendor — with no character classes, no experience points and no grinding: everything you become is defined by what you find, and everything you find has to be identified and used cleverly.

The original Brogue was created by Brian Walker in 2009. Development continues as Brogue: Community Edition (CE), a community-led fork maintained by tmewett with around forty contributors since 2019. The current stable release is 1.15.1 (February 2026).

Key Features

• Procedurally generated 26-level dungeon — every run assembles new rooms, corridors, lakes, chasms and vaults from hand-written templates, rather than repeating one fixed map.
• No XP and no levels — item-driven progression — your power comes from potions, scrolls, staves, wands, rings and charms, and most items are unidentified until you gamble on them.
• Deep environment simulation — fire spreads through grass and gases, water and lava block movement, traps litter the floor, and the right effect can destroy walls, doors or whole chasms.
• Graphical tiles or classic ASCII — tiles ship with the game; press G to toggle between tiles and the original text display.
• Recordings, statistics and high scores — save and replay a complete run, share the recording file with others, and compare results on the built-in high-score and game-stats screens.
• Variants and a friendly codebase — CE ships the Bullet Brogue variant (added in 1.15) and is deliberately built to be “a convenient base for forks and ports to new platforms”, which is how builds such as the Android port exist.
• Tiny and portable — the official Linux build is under 1 MB, and builds are published for Windows, macOS and Linux alongside a Flatpak package on Flathub.

Why Use It

Brogue is the roguelike for people who want depth without a manual: it plays quickly, looks gorgeous, and rewards careful tactics instead of hours of grinding. Community Edition modernises the 2009 original with bug fixes and quality-of-life features (including an easy mode that asks before switching you), and keeps the design intact — no accounts, no ads, no telemetry, no DRM. It is AGPL-licensed free software, so it stays that way.

Use Cases

• Short, tense runs — a full game fits in one sitting, and every death teaches something.
• Playing offline on old or low-spec hardware, including Raspberry Pi-class machines.
• Learning turn-based tactics and resource management with zero grind.
• Sharing a recording or racing friends through the same dungeon seed.

Platforms

Official builds for Windows, macOS (Intel and Apple silicon) and Linux (x86-64) are published on the project’s GitHub releases page. A Flatpak build is on Flathub, and a community Android port is also maintained. The Linux build needs SDL2 and SDL2_image from your package manager.

Licence

Free and open source — the game and its source code are licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0). Both the project site and the Community Edition repository distribute it under AGPLv3.

Similar Tools

• Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup — free and open source; a larger, class-based traditional roguelike.
• NetHack — free and open source; the sprawling dungeon crawler that inspired a generation of roguelikes.

Website

Official site: sites.google.com/site/broguegame
Source and downloads: github.com/tmewett/BrogueCE