every time i do something stupid and splat a lategame char it makes me not want to play for a long time. but the reality is there is no roguelike out there, maybe even no game out there, that is designed as intentionally as this game. sometimes they take fun fluff out or cause the step away from monsters makes you lose an aut incident but we've seem so many positive changes to this game over the years that other teams wouldn't have made, so i have to give the props even if i don't always want to play it. sorry about CJR we just got lazy

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup puts the Playing Game in Role-Playing Game.

It's the best game ever made. Ok, not really. But good luck finding another strategy game that offers the same level of tactical depth without any of the boring parts.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup simultaneously remains a capital T "Traditional Roguelike" and utterly breaks the mold of tradition by actually caring about the player. There is no grinding. There are no tedious, multi-step rituals to accomplish basic tasks in the name of fluff. It is pure tactics. Everything that is not tactics is taken out. If something is not tactics and they can't take it out, it is automated. It does not require a google search or wiki to play (and beat).

This game is a hundred thousand lovingly hand-written "fuck you" letters to another beloved game called NetHack. Every day they push another commit and write another letter.

One of the best and most influential roguelikes ever made and my most played game of all time by a mile—was an active player for over a decade and still regularly make my way back when reaching for something familiar. Big focus on tactical combat and intelligent use of resources while still keeping a sense of mystery and discovery, especially while you’re still learning the game. DCSS is open source and still in active development too so nearly fifteen years after I first started playing it’s still getting active balance changes and content updates which is amazing. If you’re just getting started with traditional roguelikes DCSS is a great jumping off point, especially for free.

I've found myself coming back to this game more than any other.
It's a game that will truly make you feel like an idiot, and then like an absolute geNius.

DCSS sets itself apart from a lot of other roguelikes by making "wiki knowledge" and spoilers less important than character builds and tactical decision making.
The game is nearly infinitely replayable, due in part to the sheer variety of character builds. Do I want to play as (yet another) near-invincible axe-wielding, illiterate minotaur? or something more interesting, like an octopus shapeshifter with a slowed perception of time, or a normal housecat with 9 lives?
You also get a say in how long the game is. You only need to collect 3 of the 15 runes of Zot to win the game, meaning each run has about ~10 hours of additional optional content.

The current devs are making a lot of questionable decisions (in my opinion), but it's great to see that the game is still actively being developed, 20+ years later.

If these days I'm much more likely to play any other, inferior roguelike than to ever play a single Crawl run again, it's just because I might have grown irreversibly jaded, having long accomplished basically every goal I set to myself over the ten years or so I spent with it - but there are very few other games this expansive that are so relentlessly committed to good design (one could even say it's radically committed, with the occasional, unforgiving removal of lingering jank that some people might have grown inexplicably attached to), and none that have done so continuously for so long. And it just keeps getting better.

Playing this game with enough experience is like operating a software you've been using for a decade. The smoothest UX of any roguelike, period, and possibly of any game ever: o, tab, ctrl+f, ctrl+g, macros, etc. The least turn-based turn-based game there is. Digital crack. Has a design philosophy which amounts to the video game equivalent of removing chess openings (and the requisite need to study them) -- it is left as an exercise to the reader to determine whether or not that is a good or bad thing.