Roguish

Overview

Every step you take interrupts with a menu — Move, Attack, or Skills — and nothing else on the board moves until you commit. That action-menu cadence is the rhythm of Roguish, a turn-based dungeon crawl by Cam Henlin, open-sourced in 2015 under a BSD licence and built on the CreateJS/EaselJS canvas stack with a Tiled-map JSON loader feeding its room layouts. Initiative, not real time, decides order: every actor on the floor — you, the patrolling robots, the dragons — carries a turnCounter that fills by its Initiative stat, and whoever fills first acts next. Fog of war hides everything beyond your scout range, then peels back tile by tile as you advance into rooms you have never seen. The win condition is concrete: fight or maneuver across the level to a treasure chest, and the run scores as XP multiplied by (100 minus total turns) plus a thousand, so a clean, fast route outranks a slow one padded with extra kills. A top-five high-score table persists in localStorage between sessions, and hitting zero HP ends the run in defeat. It suits players who like their roguelikes transparent and menu-driven rather than keystroke-heavy, since every decision is spelled out before it takes effect.

How to Play

Each of your turns opens an action menu: press M for Move, A for Attack, or S for Skills and stats. With Move selected, hover the mouse and tiles light up as valid or invalid; click a highlighted one to step there. With Attack selected, click an adjacent enemy to swing at it. Committing your choice ends your turn and lets every actor whose turnCounter has filled act in sequence. The objective is to reach the treasure chest; dropping to zero HP first ends the run in defeat. Level-ups grant skill points to pour into Initiative, Attack Speed, or Scout, and the map stays black until your explored tiles uncover it. Touch taps fire the same click handlers as a mouse, though the hover highlighting that flags reachable tiles does not work under a finger, so picking a move on a phone is partly guesswork.

Tips & Strategy

Respect the score formula before anything else: the final tally multiplies your XP by (100 minus total turns) and adds a thousand, so a fast, efficient run beats a slow one bloated with extra kills, and wandering to clear every corner actively punishes your result. Spend early level-ups on Initiative so you act before robots and dragons instead of absorbing the first hit, then branch into Scout to widen the fog-of-war cone and spot threats before you step into their range. Select Attack from the menu before opening a door you suspect is guarded, because the game waits on your input and a pre-selected strike resolves the instant an enemy stands adjacent. Hover every tile before clicking — the valid-or-invalid highlight is the only warning that a square is out of reach or walled off, and a wasted Move still burns your turn. When a dragon's turnCounter is about to fill, retreat a tile and let it come to you onto revealed ground, since fighting on tiles you have already uncovered beats stumbling into a second monster still hidden in the fog.