What is a "Rouge-Like" Board Game?

The year was 1980 and the video game Rouge was published. This is the the Rouge in "Rouge-Like". Recently I have been hearing the term rouge-like more in regards to board games and possibly like you I had no idea what that ment exactly. Thats what brings us here today, lets take a look at the term and see what that means to board games.

A Rouge-Like Game

Before we go into board games we must take a look at the video games that lead us here. In 1950s video games were used to prove that computers could do realtime work rather than scheduled Job work and show off the computing power of computers. In 1961 the computer game Spacewar! was created at MIT on a DEC PDP-1 Microcomputer and was the first game played at multiple computer installations. Spacewar! has t ships flying around a star's gravity well shooting torpedos at each other. This game was a spiritual successor to 1979's Astorids from Atari. Space war was instaration to the 1971 Game Star Trek. So Star Trek created a 8x8 grid for players to explore and each 8x8 grid was divided up into an 8x8 grid. Players worked their way through the grid to chase down and destroy the kingon ships that were also moving.

These were the ansestors to Rouge. Rouge took a Dungens and Dragons high fantasy setting and merged it with the exploritory nature seen in Star Trek (1971). Rouge was developed in 1980 and eventurally packed with the operationg system BSD 4.2. Rouge was designed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman with later contributions by Ken Arnold. The key mechanics in Rouge are permadeath and a random level setup each time the game is played. Permadeath is as bad as it sounds, when you die you are done and have to start all over with a new randomized level. Those tow aspects are the core of what people refer to when they call a video game or board game Rougelike.

How does this translate to board games? The basics would be that the game setup is different everytime its played. This could include the board or the cards or even the enemies presented in the game. The key to make the game is Rougelike is to have players have that permadeath and have to start fresh each time. Games that are Rouge like are Slay the Spire, Betrayl at House on the Hill, Tiny Epic Dungeons, or Dungeonquest.

Now there is one last thing I have learned about its Rouge-Lite games. These have the same concept of random setups every game and players have to start over when they die. However the players can carry over items, skills, or bonuses from earlier games to help them in the next game. A good example of this would be To Many Bones.