Finding gems in the world of FOSS can be a difficult task if you don’t know what you’re looking for. However, I can easily say that my top three are Antimine, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, and Minetest.
Antimine is your typical minesweeper game but it’s really well-produced and customizable. I hadn’t really played minesweeper much before Antimine, but I find myself picking up Antimine pretty often.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is an awesome roguelike that proves rather challenging. The more you play it the better you become, and sometimes you’ll get some really great RNG and it just feels awesome.
Minetest on it’s own isn’t much of a game as much as it is a 3D block-game creation engine. It’s more or less the bones that make up a FOSS Minecraft, and with projects such as Voxelibre, it is a really fantastic Minecraft alternative!
What games do y’all play from F-Droid? Feel free to mention things that come from other repos than the ones that come with F-Droid out of the box!
I think FOSS is uniquely awful for game development. I applaud anyone willing to donate their time but when it comes to games I much prefer pay-once as an attribute to focus on.
Game devs need to eat and donations are unreliable (I used to help run a community funded MUD - we admins often ended up paying server costs out of pocket) so I focus more on finding good games that avoid ad or microtransaction based revenue models so the most reliably good games I find are either shareware/demo before you buy or just a straight up cost.
I definitely appreciate OSS games though and there are good non-free OSS games out there, most people aren’t dicks that reshare the source after purchase.
I like the approach of old id games. Sell the game and after a few years open source the engine. That way the developers keep getting paid for assets and the community can keep the game alive on every platform imaginable.
Edit: On that note, Freedoom is great!
I miss shareware.
It has had a rebirth with app stores - a fair number of decent premium apps offer a reduced functionality version for free.
Maybe, but what I miss from shareware is that I would get a game (e.g. Quake, Duke Nukem) from someone and be able to play without restrictions the first chapter.
In fact, most shareware games had also multiplayer available so those were very common in school’s computer “labs”.
Freemium apps, in my experience, have too many ads and fiendish tactics to my taste (Though I know it’s not all of them).
So what type of games (or blatantly which games) have you found that you like?
I’m always on the hunt for a new type of Knights of pen and paper (2), or Hoplite.
My tippy top recommendations are:
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alexuvarov.puzzler
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.templegatesgames.RaceAndroid
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.playdekgames.android.Ascension
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.torporgames.suzerain
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.com.griffgriffgames.minesweeper
I usually like puzzle style games so it may not be to your taste. But, I’d highly recommend all of these - the first one in particular is quite a hidden gem.
Hey thank you! I just installed them all, will try out!
I don’t play it that much, but Mindustry is probably worth looking at, a factory-building game in the Factorio mold.
https://mindustrygame.github.io/
Unciv is a reimplementation of Civilization V (with simpler graphics).
https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv
Not in F-Droid, but open-source: I very much like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead as a game, but it’s really better-suited to a PC, which is the platform it was originally designed for. It’s compute-heavy, and while the Android adaptation is usable on a touchscreen, it benefits from having a Bluetooth keyboard or something. Open-world roguelike. You can just download the apks directly. This has a steep learning curve; think Dwarf Fortress. Lots of depth, though!
I’m not actually all that rabid about the touchscreen UI. Probably better solitaire UIs out there, but PysolFC is a fork of Pysol, a long-running Linux solitaire implementation. It has a ton of different games; my favorite is Eight-Off, a game that’s somewhat similar to Freecell, but less-widely played. I think that solitaire games are a good match for a phone platform, so worth having it or another solitaire game around.
https://pysolfc.sourceforge.io/
My own favorite is one that you mentioned, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which I think is a good adaptation of roguelike gameplay to the touchscreen. Its creator posts on a Threadiverse community here, [email protected].
This isn’t a specific game, but Twine-based games will generally work reasonably well on an Android web browser. These tend to be sort of multiple-choice choose your own adventure games, but span a wide range of genres. I don’t know of a single database cataloguing all of them, but there are a fair number out there on the Web.
For an example (not one I’d specifically recommend, haven’t even played through it, just hit Kagi for an example game that people were recommending):
I really enjoyed Mindustry, even though I’ve never tried another factory-type game. The polish and depth was 100% there although I got lost at one point and didn’t know how to progress. That game really changed my perspective on what is possible for FOSS. Godspeed, devs
I lost an entire day to Unciv recently.
Vector pinball is quite fun, if a bit simple
came here to say the same. I’ve spent a lot of time on this one!
Mindustry.
I think Anuto TD (a tower defense game) is the best I’ve come across.
I also really like Gauguin (Sudoku-esque) and Lexica (word game) on the more casual side.
Don’t know that it’s on F-Droid, but Lichess is also high quality and open source.
Thanks, tried the tower defence, it’s a bit boring right? I got to level 27 first try without even doing anything special and it took like forever. Free though so I’m not complaining.
Let me know when you get past level 80 😅
I didn’t really think so, but to each their own! I like the progression from not being able to afford much, up to maxing out upgrades on each tower.
There’s a speed multiplier to cut back on the waiting around. I mostly leave it around 8x speed so it’s a little faster paced.
Endless sky is a spaceship sim that I started playing recently. It’s well done, and there are a bunch of mods available for more story, ships, etc.
Endless Sky
Stone Soup Dungeon
Unciv is a great demake of Civilization 5
I think so as well.
If you like Shattered Pixel Dungeon, there’s also Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup on F-droid.
the ones i play most often are Forkyz and Simon Tatham’s Puzzles.
Agreed on the Simon puzzles. Slants is king, all others fall
Space Trader
Open Flood (puzzle game)
AAAAXY is interesting for a weird mindfuck puzzle platformer.
Frozen Bubble is a solid Puzzle Bobble clone
Super Metro Mega Wars
Anuto TD
TuxCart is pretty good!
Cards With Cats is a solid Hearts game.
PySolFC is a slightly clunky but workable solitaire.
I love Lexica, a word game similar to Boggle.
Finally, CrossWords is a good scrabble clone, though I’ve had issues with network multiplayer buggering itself. Good for local play still.
