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...and we've had Angband Borg for some time (which is very impressive!)

Try angband http://www.phial.com/angband/

Roborally - Program a robot (the best game ever)

Puerto Rico - Kinda fun, (Requires curl)

Brettspielwelt - many games including catan in german.

What's amazing, though, is that when an epic battle would arise, my friends would gather around the monitor to watch my trusty "@" take on a powerful "W" or "D"! (Yeah, they were all geeks, too.)

While I'm personally of the opinion that the level of comments that's acceptable depends a lot on the purpose of the application and the number of people working on the project, a friend of mine learned a very good ( if slightly anal retentive ) coding style from reading angband source code.

Maybe not for everyone, but you may want to try it.

Really, I haven't played Nethack since I found Adom and Angband. Angband is themed much better than others and it's easier to get into a fantasy mood in Angband than in others. (Think of Nethack: dragons, tourists and Keystone cops in the same game? Come on.)

By the way, has anybody yet found a good sci-fi roguelike? I've seen some in development but none of them were playable yet.

While I generally agree with you, there are games that have been in continuous development for over 10 years, and are all the better for it. Angband (and its finest variant) is continually improving, and is far in advance of any commercial game in terms of long-term playability. Nethack is another one that has been around for a very, very long time now, and continues to improve. It is amazing how much gameplay can get squeezed into a game over a decade or so, especially when no one cares about the graphics :)

You give the impression that nethack is not under active developement, version 3.3.1 came out rather recently. It can be found at http://www.nethack.org. Other roguelikes worth mentioning are ADOM (don't worry, he's better at designing a game then a website), and Angband. There are several derivatives of Angband and Nethack, while ADOM is closed source. A good list of other roguelike games (with links) is available at http://www.skoardy.demon.co.uk/rlnews/links.html. All of the popular roguelikes and most of the rest have linux binaries, and the source code is often available too! Nethack is even released under the GPL license.

The other side of text-based gaming are text-based MUDs, a nice list of them can be found at The Mud Connector.

The article also fails to mention that there is a free version of civilization that will run on Linux and has multi-player capability. Check out www.freeciv.org for information and downloads.

Of course, you're going to see some of both, but I think the 'bazaar'-style projects would usually have to be simple enough for the average coder to at least understand and modify parts of it, with a positive effect on the codebase. Otherwise, they'll just do something else, and leave the hard stuff to a core development team (cathedral-style) or let the code rot.

However, I think Angband is a good example of some free code that has mutated as people have changed it. There are a few main developers, and they do accept patches, but there are also tons of forks, and some healthy, nifty add-ons. (Zangband, Mangband, the Angband Borg...)

I would love to see the Tk version finally back-ported to Unix, or for that matter, any graphical front-end on top of X would be nice... If I have some more time, I'll try to work on that. I have messed with the Borg code before, and it wasn't that hard to do; I got it to use (and not sell) my Rod of Restoration, and to value items more like a Mage and less like a Paladin...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I agree, emulating a keyboard with this would be unimaginative and wasteful. Fortunately there is a much better approach--thumbcode. I can chord, but it's just not as satisfying as having a keyboard, but a suspect signing would be even better with practice. Not to mention the looks you would get when you wire your office, home and virtual pets to respond to gestures.

Now, a set of these and some display contacts with a resolution of at least 80 by 25 characters and my life would be complete. I could Angband right through meetings.

vi in a dtterm on Solaris won't let you go past the end of a line to insert, and that's a problem (a strong hint to use dtpad?)

Surely it's more of a hint to learn how to use "A" to append to the end of a line? Using cursor keys to go past the end of the line seems to me counterintuitive. Maybe that's just a hacker mentality, and it's perfectly logical to the general population. Not that I use cursor keys anyway. h, j, k and l work just fine without the need to remove your hands from the main part of the keyboard. Besides, they're the same keys as moria/angband and they're even in the same layout as the cursor keys on a good old speccy.