The most venerable set of text-based games is from the BSD games collection. These games were written several decades ago and became part of the BSD Unix distribution. Today you can enjoy them on Linux. Note: Most, if not all, of these games can be installed in any Linux distro. In this tutorial, we will just focus on the installation on Ubuntu. If you are not using Ubuntu, you can install the games from your package manager. To install the BSD games collection on Ubuntu, use: There are a total of forty-three games in the collection! Here is the list: random, gomoku, caesar, countmail, rot13, bcd, atc, number, boggle, quiz, morse, teachgammon, snake, snscore, pig, wargames, tetris-bsd, adventure, arithmetic, worms, hunt, canfield, battlestar, rain, robots, cribbage, dab, sail, wump, trek, phantasia, wtf, go-fish, monop, backgammon, worm, hack, ppt, primes, hangman, pom, cfscores, and mille. The classics among this list of classics are: adventure, one of the original text-based adventure games and from where the genre gets its name; worm, the original version of the “Snake” game that was so popular on Nokia feature phones; tetris-bsd, a terminal version of the classic game Tetris; and trek, a game for Star Trek fans where you get to kill Klingons (of course, the game was written before we knew about the Khitomer Accord). If you like the idea of Tetris running in a terminal, then Bastest is a better version than the one found in the BSD games collection. To install it on Ubuntu, type: To run it type: But text gaming doesn’t stop with the BSD games collection or Tetris. There are plenty of others to explore. What about a clone of the classic arcade games Space Invaders? Called “ninvaders”, you can install it on Ubuntu using: The “n” in the name comes from the fact that the game was written using the ncurses library. ncurses provides an API for programmers to write text-based user interfaces in a terminal-independent manner. Once installed, type “ninvaders” to start the game. If you thought that the smartphone perpetually running games like Temple Run and Subway Surfer were a new genre, then think again! What about Moon-buggy? You drive a car across the moon’s surface while trying to avoid the dangerous craters by jumping over them. Moon Buggy can be installed on Ubuntu using: The game can be started using the command “moonbuggy“. Another craze which swept the casual gaming world was 2048. Available on the web and for smartphones, the game is easy to learn but deceptively hard to master. The idea is to slide numbered tiles around a 4 x 4 grid. When the numbers touch they merge. You need to keep merging tiles until you get a tile with the value of 2048. There is also a text version. The game needs to be built from its source code, but it isn’t difficult. Here are the commands: This will download the source and build it in your current working directory. Then to run it, type: If you have any other favorite text-based games, please share them in the comment section below.
