42 of the Best Free Linux Games

Good collection. Now I have to install more stuff. hehehe

What we need to see more of is things like scrabble, and other word games, crossword puzzles etc.

I was asked recently if scrabble was available on Linux.

Scrabble shouldn't be that hard to make. Python + glade + pygame + some word library and you're 75% done. The tough one would be AI but you could always start with multiplayer hot-seat and go from there. No AI required!

Also: http://pyscrabble.sourceforge.net/ http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=382144

Thanks, will chase this up.

I once wrote Scrabble as a university assignment. Yes, it had AI (pretty good player, even if not very advanced algorithmically) but it used insane amount of memory ;)

Do you still have the code, can it be released under GPL, so it can be improved.

No doubt jezuch; Do you still have the code? Because tracyanne is right, you can release it under the GPL if you want and let others see if they can improve it.

If it was a uni assignment, then the school may very well own the code.

Yeah, it stinks.

Quoting:If it was a uni assignment, then the school may very well own the code.

If that is true, how things have changed, when I was doing my Computer degree, I got to own all my code, in fact the school insisted I take all the copies (on fan fold paper) and do what I like with them, including binning them.

I think Hasbro/JW Spear get really arsey about people making Scrabble games as they have a trademark on the name. My mum wants to have scrabble and I Was trying to get an official version of it running under WINE for her. Whether you could write a game and call it something other than Scrabble even though it was a direct rip-off I don't know.

I had a good search and only came up with the Python version.

Nopt a bad list at all. Some titles there I don't even recongnise, and others were somewhat incomplete when I last saw them, but now seem quite polished.

Wesnoth has to be the most addictive game in the bunch. To give you an idea how much: My wife and I play World of Warcraft and she introduced one of our friends on there to Wesnoth... he then disappeared for days, and even now we don't see him as often anymore.

Quoting:Do you still have the code, can it be released under GPL, so it can be improved.

Yes, I do. It was co-written by a fellow student, whom I'll have to ask too, but he's on a honeymoon at the moment :)

Quoting:If it was a uni assignment, then the school may very well own the code.

I don't know the policy of my university, but I don't think the Eye-Pee (quoting Tuxchick) hysteria reached Poland yet. It looked like they didn't care about that. And, anyway, I still have my moral rights!

*Edit*: And yeah, Hasbro may be the biggest culprit here. One of Polish online gaming sites (www.kurnik.pl) had to significantly change its Scrabble game (and rename it to Literaki) because of that. But it turned out pretty good and is still very enjoyable :)

@Sander

I downloaded ProScrabble http://logical-games.mcctm.com/scrabble.html linked to from that Ubuntu thread. The Linux Version fails to run on my Mandriva box, but the Windows version run just fine under WINE (using Crossover), so long as I set the "bottle" to emulate WinXP.

Quoting:Whether you could write a game and call it something other than Scrabble even though it was a direct rip-off I don't know.

Yes you can. It's the same with things like Tetris et. al. Hasbro are a bunch of litigious bastards but they've never won a suit. They always scared the other guys into a settlement. Meanwhile, some other lawsuits have come and gone and were ruled in favour of cloners (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=14990). I don't remember any copyright or trademark lawsuit being ruled on against the clones. At least not for copying game ideas and gameplay and the like. The most notable exception being Dance Dance Revolution but they didn't claim copyright or trademark infringement but patent infringement. I think we can be pretty sure Scabble isn't patented :-)

Hasbro is like Disney- they rip off traditional, existing works, then try to lock them up and own them forever.

> I downloaded ProScrabble [HYPERLINK@logical-games.mcctm.com] Great tip tracyanne linux version runs fine on my rig (Ubu 8.04)