Over the weekend I was home with nothing but my laptop to entertain me, and seeing how I don’t have too many games on it, I went hunting around for something cheap and easy to download onto it.

I found Battle for Wesnoth, and if you haven’t checked it out yet, you probably should. It’s open source, and it’s actually really amazing.

First of all, I will have to weed a few of you out. It’s a turn based strategy game, so right there a good non-nerdy percentage of you can stop reading. Yes, it’s tactical strategy, yes it can be slow and require you to think, and yes, it even gets a little boring sometimes.

But other than that, it’s really, really great, all the more interesting because it’s open source. I played an early version of this game a year or two ago (.6 I think), and it wasn’t even close to the amount of polish and balance that’s going on in the latest version (just past 1.0).

They kept the game simple on purpose. You can recruit (and recall, if they live through scenarios) various types of skirmishing units (archers, soldiers, mages, horsemen), and then run them on a hexmap against an opponent. Each unit gains experience and can level up through 3 or 4 tiers of advancement. And like Warcraft, the game has a number of different factions, each one of which plays differently, but balanced against the others.

It’s a good package, too. The graphics are simple and efficient, there’s music that’s not bad (although easily turned off), and there’s some terrific singleplayer campaigns included with the game, and a plethora (yes, a plethora) of user created scenarios to download, along with a great editor to create your own, if you’re interested in that kind of thing.

Great job by everyone involved, and one of the best free games I’ve ever checked out.