The Tombs of the Asciiroth

The Game

Version 0.7.0 released 1 June 2026

The Tombs of Asciiroth is a free, open source game you can play right now in your browser. It has arcade, puzzle and exploration-style game play in an extensive world of font-based abstraction (it is similar to Nethack but really, closest to ZZT, which you can also play on-line).

Although named after the primary scenario that shipped with the game, there’s a tutorial and another completed scenario, “The Chalice of Goldcastle” (Anna Anthropy).

The Tombs of the Asciiroth

The Player’s Guide talks tactics and introduces many of the things you'll find in the game.

News: This game was written in the late 2000s. It was posted for many years at icculus.org and to the best of my knowledge, only two people ever finished the main scenario: myself, and one other person who wrote to tell me about it. However, Anna Anthropy wrote a better scenario for the game which you can also play! And that was it for many years. Because it was written in Java and converted to JavaScript using GWT, I was no longer able to update it and the code seemed dead. It was just too big a job to re-write the game directly in JavaScript.

But then AI happened, and it became feasible to resurrect the code because the AI could do a lot of the grunt work. So here it is again!

The Game Editor

Asciiroth has a map editor that can be used to create maps. Read the Guide to Creating Asciiroth Maps for details, and the API documentation for a description of all the available pieces and how they work. If you actually do this (again, only one person besides myself ever created a scenario, or ever completed a scenario), contact me and we’ll add it!

Asciiroth Map Editor