online-go.com VS crawl

OGS is the closest thing I’ve found to lichess but it’s quite good! https://online-go.com/

That's nuts. I'll be honest online-go.com is my least favorite server to play on. Unfortunately it's one of the only ones that doesn't require software installation so it's easy to recommend to new players.

In 2016, I thought I'd give up on playing Go, seeing that our tree searching overlords beat us in every which way. Funny thing is, I'm playing a game right now [1].

[1] https://online-go.com/

Hey guys, I own Gomoku.com domain and the site (currently down) very similar to https://online-go.com/ I no longer have the time to maintain or try to grow it, if anyone is interested taking it over let me know!

and also, https://online-go.com (OGS) is the best English server for playing online and getting a rank.

https://online-go.com/ is the most popular English server, called OGS. It's pretty good.

OGS (https://online-go.com)

OGS is open source, anyone can contribute to their github repository and it's in need of developers - almost 200 open issues. It's likely easier to gain traction and more beneficial to the go community compared to starting from scratch.

OGS probably has the largest pool of English-speaking beginners. https://online-go.com/ It's a web app, so it's very easy to get signed up and playing.

Also, I'd suggest trying to switch to human players pretty soon (online-go.com is the place to be for that), AIs and weak AIs will play with a lot of strange and bad moves, and playing against too many of them might give you bad habits.

It's probably not as rigorous as what you're thinking of but the devs of DCSS have cited online win rates of certain combinations as the impetus for balance changes before.

https://crawl.develz.org

In a similar vein, see Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a free and open-source roguelike that's been continuously developed by volunteers for 20 years: http://crawl.develz.org/

They are entirely too humanoid. I mean, look at these splash screens: Kiku, Ignis, Chei. While those images shouldn't be taken as canonical, they at least demonstrate the general inhumanity of the Crawl pantheon.

Since you like turn-based games too, try some old-school roguelikes. Many are open-source freeware so you have nothing to lose but time. I've been playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for almost 10 years.

Since Brogue's already been mentioned, I'd add Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Tales of Maj Eyal as pretty beginner friendly games.

For people who don't follow trunk, Okawru's gifting has been changed (and arguably* nerfed):

My personal first timer recommendation? Maybe Nethack or Dungeon crawl?

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - Free traditional roguelike with fair mechanics and a lot of variety between species/skill/god choices (~25 gods and maybe with the exception of sif/veh and oka/trog, they are very distinct). The tiles are great. There's many developers and they are very welcoming of code or vault contributions. Reducing incentives to play tediously is one of the goals. Easily hundreds of hours of gameplay for free. Playable online (connecting to a server through your browser/terminal) or offline (terminal or tiles version). There have been win streaks of 50+ games with a variety of species/background combos so you know it's mostly fair(it IS possible for rng to give you an unwinnable game), but it's very difficult if your goal is to win every game.