That worked, thanks! Never needed a space in Adventuron-only games so I'm not in the habit of putting one in, but that's an easy fix.
You actually do need a space in Adventuron games. It's in all the doco and all the sample games. The space is a separator between the verb and the noun. The noun may be any of the wild cards (*, -, _). If it worked without a space, then that's a miracle. If there's no space, I would have thought that the underscore would have been treated as the last character of the verb. Perhaps that's a bug in the Adventuron editor that the compiler quietly accounts for.