WTactics is a beautiful, freely licensed card game which pleasantly surprises for example by having it's amazing assets under free licenses, not shying away from employing same-sex love themes and now, by inviting game designers to share an apartment in lovely Sweden on WTactics development during July 2013.
People all over the world are hereby welcomed to participate in Summer of Cards 2013 – the first ever real life gathering of the dev. team and all those of you that want to get aboard and contribute to the worlds first truly pro libre customizable card game, our dear WTactics. 1:st to 28:th of July 2013 is when this is going down in Malmö, Sweden, so do some reading in here and scribble us a mail already so we can start planning for wicked goodness. You come and stay as you may.
"A couchsurfing style gamejam" was approved as a possible description of the event.
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 ;)
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 gamePhylo. Sadly it is even more restrictive in licensing (CC-BY-NC-ND), thus I am stretching it a bit to mention it here.
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!
The current OpenGameArt challenge is 'mobile devices' and ends on Monday, December 5, 2011. The contest before that was low on participants and a survey was started to figure out how to get more people involved.
Give our artists a picture of you or your beloved one and become a part of the game! The artist will create a nice portrait with your chosen class, clothing and equipment, making it an everlasting part of our game and the open source communities, turning it into an immortal memory.
