Open Source boardgames, better on a screen or on a table?

Staying with the theme of the festive season, how can FreeGamer help you prevent that awkward silence when you sit down with your relatives and realize you have nothing really to talk about? Well, open-source board games to the rescue... and you can spice up that quality family time by introducing some FOSS concepts ;)

A rather interesting concept is d0x3d! (a network security game):



It is actually intended to be a sort of teaching aid (ideas how to use it in class here), but it seems interesting enough to play with friends and relatives too.
You can order a full version of the game or download the sources under the sadly more restrictive CC-by-NC-SA here.

A similar concept of combining teaching with playing is the trading card game Phylo. Sadly it is even more restrictive in licensing (CC-BY-NC-ND), thus I am stretching it a bit to mention it here.

Much more open (and mentioned a few times before on FG) is Wtactics:

Wtactics card examples

Not much updates for it lately, but I am still looking forward to have in playable in their under development web-based client or Wagic.

Another nicely licensed (CC-by-SA) but update-lacking open-source board game is Sovereign:

Sovereign game board

It's a RISK like, but hexagon based strategy game. Oh and while we are at it... check out again this great post on Settlers of Catan implementations we had a while back; which leads us again to screen-based implementations of board-games.

One such general system is VASSAL, a FOSS engine to build and play online adaptations of board games and card games. It makes it possible to play live on the Internet or by email and has a quite extensive library of (mostly propitiatory) game modules.

VASSAL game module example

Another recently developed and graphically quite amazing "on screen" board game system is Desperate Gods. Again, sadly not FOSS (only shared source) but as explained on their GIT account, they are open to license parts of it for mods etc. under more liberal licenses (upon individual request).

Definitely also worth mentioning in this context is TripleA, also a RISK like game that recently had a rather big update and now includes a new map-creator for example.

TripleA, new WWII worldmap

And last but not least, MegaMek has to be mentioned too, as it is probably the most fully featured BattleTech online implementation.

But if you know of more cool examples of these kind of crossovers between FOSS computer gaming and table-top games, please comment below!

Category: boardgame, MegaMek, tripleA, VASSAL, Wagic, wtactics