I've been playing Angband off and on since the mid 80's when it's ancestor, Moria, hit the DECUS tapes and we'd run it on our VAX.
I can't speak historically as to what it may or may not have pioneered in roguelikes, but it's varies dramatically philosophically from the likes of Nethack and its bottomless trivia and tricks. Angband is more straightforward.
Angband, with its Tolkien theme, has large maps, hordes of monsters, frightening uniques, a large amount of ancient artifacts and has its gameplay centered around a town that you routinely travel to in order to refresh and reload.
There are lots of variants from "Vanilla" as its called. Different themes, different mechanics, different character classes. I don't follow the space to know if there are a lot of Nethack variants the like that Angband has spawned.
In a game that favors cautious advance (it's not uncommon to fully recover after an encounter), the recent edition introduced a new Blackguard class that's more momentum based in that once in combat, you'd like to sustain combat to get more powerful, and stronger. It's a nice change of pace from the classic characters and play styles.
It's actively maintained and has a passionate community.
There's tons of variants, probably the most out of any of the roguelikes. ZAngband "Zelazny Angband" took the tolkien elements and added elements from Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber series. SAngband "skills angband" added weapon skills and probably tons more. OAngband "opinion angband" scratched the itch of its developers about how Angband should work. MAngband was (wait, IS! it had a release in 2020) a mind-blowing multiplayer Angband variant.
Tales of Maj'Eyal https://store.steampowered.com/app/259680/Tales_of_MajEyal/ is the continuation of an angband variant called Tales of Middle-Earth / T.o.M.E., which name change I gather was necessary because DarkGod wanted to go commercial.
I wanted to link to [0] for a complete list but it's having struggles today. [1] and [2] have lists but I would guess that roguebasin's list would be more authoritative.
I got started with moria/umoria on the Amiga, which had beautiful graphical tiles. Then I played quite a lot of moria/angband in the terminal on Linux (occasionally dabbling with the tileset/gui versions).
It's an interesting game.
> MAngband was (wait, IS! it had a release in 2020) a mind-blowing multiplayer Angband variant.
I still remember how delightfully different the game became with multi-player - mostly because it wasn't lock-step turns (a la Civilisation), but tick-based. I still think there's room for a multi-player rouge-like - but Mangband is not it for me.
But it remains an illuminating lesson in game design ("Completely change the feel of your game, with this one wierd t(r)ick!" :)
ZAngband is, sadly, very dead -- the last release was in 2003. I miss it.
Another wacky, fun (and, sadly, also dead) variant was Steamband, a steampunk-themed variant with completely new classes, races, and monsters: http://angband.oook.cz/steamband/steamband.html
TOME is such a great game. I've played Nethack since early 90's, thereafter Angband and Zangband and finally TOME. TOME is very polished, slick, beautiful, full of depth, different challenges and styles. Also actively maintained. Sunken so many hours while listening to talk radio.
It's notable that a big reason that Angband has a large number of variants is because a lot of its data is in easily readable, editable flat text files. For instance:
This allowed people to start work on variants without having to write C or even recompile. Also, Angband's source code has a reputation for being pretty clean and easy to understand and modify.
My favorite version on the PC was called I think something like "ultimate" angband... it had code to procedurally generate vaults - larger open rooms that were oval, round, or other non rectangular shapes (within character set limits) with various geometric side chambers - on random levels that were stuffed with both out of depth monsters and out of depth treasure.
Deciding how and when to approach those was an exercise in itself, and the rewards were worth it.
It also had monsters that would breed explosively, as in between your moves. In the time it took you to take three steps toward a pile of louses (lice), they would multiply from 5 to 12 total. Fun stuff.
> It also had monsters that would breed explosively, as in between your moves. In the time it took you to take three steps toward a pile of louses (lice), they would multiply from 5 to 12 total. Fun stuff.
That has always been a feature of mainline Angband. "Breeding explosively" is the exact term used in the monster memory.
There are lots of Nethack variants! There's a Nethack tournament called Junethack going on right now where competitors can play like at least 10 different variants or something.
I can't speak historically as to what it may or may not have pioneered in roguelikes, but it's varies dramatically philosophically from the likes of Nethack and its bottomless trivia and tricks. Angband is more straightforward.
Angband, with its Tolkien theme, has large maps, hordes of monsters, frightening uniques, a large amount of ancient artifacts and has its gameplay centered around a town that you routinely travel to in order to refresh and reload.
There are lots of variants from "Vanilla" as its called. Different themes, different mechanics, different character classes. I don't follow the space to know if there are a lot of Nethack variants the like that Angband has spawned.
In a game that favors cautious advance (it's not uncommon to fully recover after an encounter), the recent edition introduced a new Blackguard class that's more momentum based in that once in combat, you'd like to sustain combat to get more powerful, and stronger. It's a nice change of pace from the classic characters and play styles.
It's actively maintained and has a passionate community.