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!

Planets are a nice thing...

...but make us FreeGamer blog-authors lazy, as all the news are already in our awesome game and development planets :p
New to the feeds is our revision control planet, for those news-freaks that want to keep up to date even if it is just a change in punctuation of the readme file :p

It is btw interesting to see on this planet how much changes happen in the Xonotic SVN, while to the outward observer the project seems to be moving only slowly forward.
However, recently they released an auto-builds update script, which makes it much easier to keep up with their development builds (which seems to be the preferred version for them now in general, but things can break from time to time). Oh and for the lulz: a "my little pony" mod recently surfaced for Xonotic also :p

Next on the list? Ahh yes, Stunt Rally version 1.2 got released:

Stunt Rally 1.2

Changes include (amongst other stuff) a new split-screen and a ghost car rally mode.

Other things to mention? Mage is a open-source MTG client, but not as nice looking as Wagic. But it might convince you with other features (of which Mage has a lot ;) ).
Unknown Horizons has a nice news update with all the improvements Google's Summer of Code gave them and the Zod engine is set out to improve the multiplayer part of the (back then really nice) game Z (using the unfree media from the original it seems).

Wagic

Yes I have to admit... I spend waaay too much money back in the nineties on that crazy trading card game MTG ;) But hey, I am a changed man now and I beat that addiction ;)
So I don't think I should actually touch the game I am about to present to you with anything but a 10 ft pole, but well... it is probably a damn fun game ;)

Anyways...Wagic is obviously an only half-heartily hidden Magic the Gathering implementation on your favorite gaming device (including the neat Linux driven N900, which is actually a FOSS dream compared to all those Android smart phones... no, I am not getting paid for mentioning it ;) ). And with that we have already the main problem with Wagic... it's data and media can obviously not be really free, even if they don't actually use any copyrighted pictures from that game as far as I can tell.

But the rest of that game looks actually really nice, and with the source under the BSD you can't make much wrong, right?

Wagic gameplay

But maybe the engine could be combined with the really FOSS Wtactics card game? (Edit: yay, they seem to consider doing so in the future; see comments!)