I recently resumed playing NetHack, one of my all-time favorite video games. NetHack is a very old and magnificently complicated rogue-like dungeon adventure game with terminal style graphics. I’ve been playing since high school or maybe early college and while I don’t quite remember my first game I’ve enjoyed it for what feels like a very long time.
Each year devnull.net hosts an annual NetHack tournament in November. I always felt I could do better in these tournaments so this year I committed to improving my game. My goal is simple: I am hoping to win the game 13 times by ascending all 13 character classes during the tournament.
Ascending 13 times in NetHack is not an easy task. The game is incredibly hard and features many opportunities for fast permanent death. I’ve only beat NetHack a handful of times and only with 3 or 4 of the character classes available. There are a few months left for me to up my game and that’s what I’ll be doing.
The tournament administrators at devnull.net have a “Best of 13” grand prize described as “Awarded to the player with most ascensions in 13 consecutive games with no multiple ascension of the same race/role/alignment/gender combination.” I don’t expect to ascend sequentially, but I’m going to see how far I can get with my own personal best but not quite perfect 13.