There have been many occasions where, in looking around on the Internet for a good, free game leaves me feeling high and dry.  Especially in the realm of tactical, turn-based RPGs.  It’s not the Internet’s fault; these games are notoriously difficult to make.  Not just programming them, but also because their graphics can be sub-par, or the story development isn’t there at all.

Battle for Wesnoth, however, delivers it all.

Battle For Wesnoth

I would put something pithy and possibly great about this game right here, as to its aims, but I’ll let the game’s developers speak for themselves on this one:

Battle for Wesnoth is a free, turn-based tactical strategy game with a high fantasy theme, featuring both single-player, and online/hotseat multiplayer combat. Fight a desperate battle to reclaim the throne of Wesnoth, or take hand in any number of other adventures…

From that simple statement, it delivers it all and much, much more.  The original campaign, comprising 19 missions which encompass a fun and engaging storyline, took me many an hour to get through on the various levels of difficulty. It seems that these guys “get it”.

In addition to the original game’s campaign, the community around Battle For Wesnoth has created a massive library of others to partake in. Armed with a rich wiki of information, a robust map and campaign editor, and a large support community, this is definitely one of those gems in the crown of open source.

Campaigns can be downloaded from within the game. No muss, no fuss. (click to enlarge)

Wesnoth also features a comprehensive map and campaign editor (click to enlarge)

The principal campaign features playable characters that are critical to the storyline (click to enlarge)

Wesnoth's campaign system includes story elements driven by individual character dialogue (click to enlarge)

And just to sweeten this post up a little, here’s a trailer for it.  You’d almost swear you were looking at a commercial game.

When you play it, I would highly recommend running in fullscreen mode, in order to avoid any issues you might run into with mouse scrolling on larger maps.  I ran Wesnoth on my Linux machine with only 512MB of RAM, and it performed admirably. On Windows the experience was exactly the same.

And here’s the usual suspects. As of this writing, Battle for Wesnoth’s stable version was 1.6.2.

Operating Systems:

• Windows
• Linux
• OS X (10.4+)
• Solaris
• AmigaOS4
• OS/2 & eComStation
• RISC OS

If your operating system isn’t listed, take a crack at porting it.  Sources are available and Wesnoth is licensed under the GNU GPL version 2.0.