crawl VS sil-q

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.

Soulcalibur vi. You should check out sil-q. The dev took inspiration for Tolkien and best part is that its free! https://github.com/sil-quirk/sil-q

The other current one is Sil-Q, which is a further variant of an existing variant called Sil. I don't like it (either version) so I can't comment much, but it seems popular.

Check out Sil-Q, based on Angband and set in LoTR's deep past but completely redone so that spells and skills act together to make vastly less use of throwing fire around and vastly more of hiding, sealing doorways, increasing healing speed, seeing farther and through walls, putting monsters to sleep, and so on. It's surprisingly successful at feeling like Tolkien's accounts of the great accomplishments of Middle-Earth. https://github.com/sil-quirk/sil-q/

It does have a tileset as of Sil-Q 1.5, which you can download here. I drew it myself! I’d recommend changing the font to 16x25.fon in the topbar, then turning on the tiles after starting your first game. Have fun!

I believe Sil started as a fork of Angband, and it's a favourite of mine. You might want to check that out. (I believe currently the most up-to-date version is Sil-Q https://github.com/sil-quirk/sil-q).

You want more? :D - The Temple of Torment Medieval fantasy world with demons, quest based gameplay, you can play with the mouse. - Under the Mad Mountain - TraumaRL - From here Numeron Reactor download Hellspace (2014), Rogue City Scavenger (2013) and Nightfall (2012) - Roguelegends: Dark Realms dark fantasy, cosmic horror - Sil-Q Tactical combat - Angband

Sil - A roguelike based on LOTR with a strong emphasis on discovery and tactical combat. I personally recommend Sil-Q over the original version as it comes with a bunch of bug fixes, balancing changes and improvements to the game.

Sil-Q, https://github.com/sil-quirk/sil-q, is an actively updated version of [Sil](https://nickmcconnell.github.io/AngbandPlus/sil.html), which itself is based on NPPAngband.