Categories

Official Development State classification

• Major Roguelikes: Time-tested and found worthy of attention; foremost representatives of the genre.
• Stable Games: Playable games in their given state, merely lacking the fanbase to enter the ranks of the majors.
• Beta Projects: In general release, but not yet considered to be complete. Players are cautioned to expect and possibly await more polished releases.
• Alpha Projects: Proof of concept releases; generally unplayable.
• Talkie-Talkie Projects: Projects under discussion for which no actual code or executable has circulated.
• Defunct Projects: Games which are no longer being developed and are not considered finished by their authors.
• Commercial Games: Commercial roguelike games.

Master lists

Following are quite large lists of roguelikes:

• List of roguelikes
• Lists of roguelikes by year
• List of roguelikes by theme

Evolutionary Branch Classification

These are the two main evolutionary branches taken from Rogue. Of course, many roguelikes belong to neither, especially more recent games which often borrow from other genres, such as simulation and strategy.

• Hacklike: these games take inspiration primarily from Hack and its descendants. NetHack is the most advanced in this genre. ADOM and Crawl may also be considered hacklikes.
• Band: these are games which take inspiration from Moria and its descendants. Properly, this term would only refer to Angband and its variants, but one can extend it to other games with similar playstyle. Many consider Diablo to be a band.

See Tree of roguelike evolution

Special Categories

• Handheld roguelikes - for cellphones, Game Boys, etc.
• RogueLike Engines, which in and of themselves are not games, offer the means to construct new games.
• Coffeebreak roguelikes - extremely short, but fun
• Console roguelikes - for video game consoles