Skip to main content

Ubuntu Games: The Battle for Wesnoth.

    The Battle for Wesnoth is a turn based stratagy game set in your typical fantasy world.  Wesnoth is a ton of fun, as long as you can look past it's outdated graphics which granted most free open source games have.  It has a great style about it in my opinion and is fairly addictive.  This game is easy to get the hang of and could compete with many commercial stratagy games of the same style.

Campaign


    The campaign I have played so far has a fun classic fantasy story about a royal destined for the throne with an elderly wizard as a constant companion.  The two get into all kinds of hairy situations as they do battle against a wicked queen as she attempts to expand her evil empire.  The Battle for Wesnoth may seem at times to be telling the same old fantasy story you have heard over and over again.  However, it does it in my opinion in a way that is original and fresh.


Game play


    The game play reminds me a lot of civilization's combat.  Wesnoth has some RPG-like elements.  Your units (or characters if you will) level and you can choose different character classes as they advance.


    While your objectives vary from scenario to scenario, essentially your goal it to capture more cities, more gold and outmanoeuvre your opponent.  Often this involves either surviving a certain number of turns or killing your enemy's leader character or wiping out their army completely.


Immersion


    Wesnoth is very much your typical fantasy world, filled with all those wierd names you're not quite sure if you are pronouncing correctly.  It is full of maps, kingdoms, factions, races, characters and everything else you love about a completely made up fantasy world.


    While the world (from my perspective) is lacking lore, there is a whole community behind Wesnoth that is always creating more campaigns and history for the game and the world that it inhabits. Wesnoth doesn't take itself very seriously. It almost seems to poke fun at itself sometimes, which I personally like. However if you are looking for an immersive fantasy experience this is probably not what you are looking for.




How to get it?


    One of the great things about The Battle for Wesnoth is that you can get it on all major desktop platforms, but my focus of course is on how to get it for Ubuntu.  This is remarkably easy.  Wesnoth is available from the Ubuntu Software Center or from running the following in a terminal:
sudo apt-get wesnoth-1.8

Rating

    This game is great. The gameplay is a lot of fun and is fairly addictive. The campaigns have interesting enough stories to keep you into the game.  The world as a whole however could use some more development. I am giving The Battle for Wesnoth 4 group hugs out of 5, an awesome game with a lot of potential for further development.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Three Books for Novice Investors

    I have only been seriously investing for about sixth months now.  I say "seriously" because I have attempted to invest for about 5 years but it looked a lot like this ...  So my only successes have been in investing in index funds.  Which If you don't have the time or energy to pick your own investments is the best way to go, in my opinion.       Almost all of my "education" has come through reading a handful of books. The Richest Man In Babylon     The Richest Man in Babylon comes all the way from the deep dark past of 1920's America.  It is series of stories and parables set in ancient Babylon and designed to teach financial wisdom.  The book stresses discipline and prudence, consistently saving, avoiding debt, not investing in risky ventures etc.  I have to wonder if people in the 1920's had taken his advice if the whole financial mess that followed wouldn't have happe...

Lunch time in The Dirty!

    The Dalles has quite a few restaurants relative to it's size.  Some are great some are down right bad.       These are my five favorite places to eat lunch in The Dalles in no particular order.  Some are old favorites and others are relatively new establishments.  All serve delicious food and drink. Montira's Thai     Montira's is the only thai place in town.  But that lack of competition doesn't keep them from delivering a quality product.  Other restaurants of the Asian  variety  have them beat as far as portion size and price go but they  serve  a quality product consistently.  I can't say that about many other places in town.     Montira's serves really great food for a decent price.  Just be warned if you ask for extra-spicy you will feel it all the next day...  But its worth it if you really like spicy. Spooky's     Spooky's is one of t...

Favorite Things: May 2018 Edition

New series of monthly (my intentions at least) things I'm really enjoying... Ride Report Ride Report  is an app which uses your phone's location data to automatically keep track of your bike rides.  For each ride it asks you a simple survey "How was your ride."  After collecting enough survey data from rides Ride Report can generate a map showing the worst and best rides for a city.  Some cities are even using this data to make better transportation decisions.   I'm not sure if this app will work at a smaller scale for a city like The Dalles, but the idea is very cool.  The more people the use it the more helpful it will be.  At this point I've only ever said my rides were great and being the only user in town this is very unscientific. I highly recommend using this app for fun and better city planning or at least better informed fellow cyclists. Libby Libby is an app which allows you to borrow ebooks through your local library....