Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game

Highly suggest connecting with one of the lead developers, Charles Dang/Vultraz, if you have any C++ jobs in the USA.

He's been a developer on Wesnoth since 2012 but only graduated university in 2024. Unfortunately, it's been an absolutely brutal market for new graduates. Even if you're a maintainer on one of the most popular OSS C++ projects on GitHub.

I can't recommend him enough.

edit: LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-dang-10994b1b4

My only gripe with the game is that healing doesn't give XP to the healing units. This means you need to place them in combat to level up instead of placing them behind the fighters like they are intended to be, and with them initially having low health they are very squishy. I know you can kinda cheese it by reducing a monster to 1-2 HP and then getting them to attack, but it feels like going against their role.

I played the heck out of this about a decade ago. It's an amazing game, and I'd love to return to it and see what has changed.

A+! They even had an iOS version a while back: `https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-battle-for-wesnoth/id14507...` (this may be the "Mac" version, see: `https://www.reddit.com/r/wesnoth/comments/1pjkwbw/i_had_wesn...`).

If that's your jam then there's also a (non-open-source) "Hero's Hour" which tickles the old Heroes of Might and Magic stylings, works reasonably well on Xbox, where I've been doing most of my gaming lately.

As far as Open Source gaming success stories, I'd put this up there in the Top 5 for "Original IP and Concept" (if that makes sense). Just a stellar labor of love, worth giving it a shot to play!

Grew up playing Wesnoth, still adore the game. There is a TON of third party content and a serious extended universe, too!

Sweet! Does anyone have a list of high-quality open source games like this?

(Subjective interpretation, but something like, "I couldn't believe it's free, I would have paid for it anyway.")

An absolute gem I came across randomly many years ago. Picked up Mewgenics and it left me wishing it had some mechanics from Wesnoth like faster animations (Mewgenics caps at 4x), undo action (at least if the action doesn't trigger any rng/damage behavior), skip enemy turns.

I only wish they added more campaigns into the official lore.

My kids and I have been playing this for about 20 years. It's worked on Linux, Mac and Windows and has never stopped working.

In the meantime so many other favorite games have disappeared or become obsolete.

There's no absolute reason great games can't be as immortal as chess. Maybe Wesnoth can be.

I remember playing this a lot back in the Ubuntu 6 days.

I heard about this game many many times due to software developers showcasing it as an example of a good libre videogame. However, I don't know a single person who played it and I have never seen anyone recommending it for its gameplay.

Blocked by Anubis? Just says "invalid response" with no explanation or instructions for how to fix it. Chrome on Android - not exactly niche.

Thanks for that.

I've been playing this for 10+ years :) it's one awesome game and the details for sprites and art direction is sweet.

Fond memories, playing this throughout my youth :')

In high school I kept a USB drive full of portable apps. This was one of them. I can still recommend it.

I love this game. It is also fairly easy to tinker with the units if you are like me, that is a big win.

Open Source Games are really underrated Gems

What would need to happen that more players are available for online games?

So it's like HMM but the whole map is in battle mode?

Interesting! Is this similar to Age of Empires?

Never heard of this game. Is it similar to Warcraft III?

only missing point about this game is some of the real word parameters like moral,flanking etc. Maybe a real history mod would be amazing like ancient era or medieval ages.

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