#+date: <2013-05-31 00:00>
#+title: The Battle for Wesnoth

Having recently installed Crunchbang and written a report on bringing
modern games to Linux, it was in my interest to check out a few open
source games. The past few nights I have been obsessively playing
[[http://www.wesnoth.org/][Battle for Wesnoth]], a turn based fantasy
strategy game freely available to Windows, Mac, and Linux.

If you are enthused by Sid Meier's Civilization series, you will likely
also be entertained by BfW. The map is out on a hexagonal grid, covering
various types of terrain. A single unit can occupy spaces, and the
battle is led by a players heroes, who can recruit units from a keep, as
shown below:

[[http://nathanisom.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Screenshot-05312013-083154-AM.png][[[http://nathanisom.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Screenshot-05312013-083154-AM-300x179.png]]]]

The thing that has been drawing me to Wesnoth the past couple of nights
are the campaigns. The sense of purpose is a great thing to have in a
game. Here is the list of campaigns included in the vanilla version(at
this time)

[[http://nathanisom.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Screenshot-05312013-084120-AM.png][[[http://nathanisom.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Screenshot-05312013-084120-AM-178x300.png]]]]

taken from the wiki

That's a lot of adventure! To me, these strings of campaign missions are
more enjoyable than a civ game where you start simply with the objective
to “win”. I realize that you can download player-made scenarios for Civ
5, but the fact that all of these came included was very attractive to
me.