868-HACK

868-HACK is a minimalist roguelike with a cyberspace theme. The 6x6 board distills the basics of the genre into bite-sized bits.

I was given the game by one of the top players; judging by my current dismal high-score the skill required to score at that level is really impressive. Even playing casually, learning enough to get to the end of eight levels was a pleasantly challenging progression. I’m not going to explain anything about the rules, because they’re just different enough from the norm that teasing out what is going on is part of the fun I had.

What I will tale about is the procedural generation. The game’s space is small, but dense. There are only 36 tiles on each level, but each tile is potentially significant. Combine that with the relationships with neighboring tiles being important, the different movement rules for the monsters, the spell-like functions that you can run if you can afford the cost, and the subtleties of the scoring system, and it demonstrates that you don’t need an infinitely large game map to make good use of procedural generation.