akyuuBattle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game
Grew up playing Wesnoth, still adore the game. There is a TON of third party content and a serious extended universe, too!
A+! They even had an iOS version a while back: `https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-battle-for-wesnoth/id14507...` (this may be the "Mac" version, see: `https://www.reddit.com/r/wesnoth/comments/1pjkwbw/i_had_wesn...`).
If that's your jam then there's also a (non-open-source) "Hero's Hour" which tickles the old Heroes of Might and Magic stylings, works reasonably well on Xbox, where I've been doing most of my gaming lately.
As far as Open Source gaming success stories, I'd put this up there in the Top 5 for "Original IP and Concept" (if that makes sense). Just a stellar labor of love, worth giving it a shot to play!
I played the heck out of this about a decade ago. It's an amazing game, and I'd love to return to it and see what has changed.
My only gripe with the game is that healing doesn't give XP to the healing units. This means you need to place them in combat to level up instead of placing them behind the fighters like they are intended to be, and with them initially having low health they are very squishy. I know you can kinda cheese it by reducing a monster to 1-2 HP and then getting them to attack, but it feels like going against their role.
It's OSS, no?
I've enjoyed this, honestly. There's a whole short-term pain/long-term gain tradeoff to risking healers that adds more strategy to the campaign.
> I know you can kinda cheese it by reducing a monster to 1-2 HP
In practice, I've found it difficult to get monsters to 1-2 HP since it often means not using your most powerful attacks. On harder difficulties I usually can't afford the opportunity cost.
Yeah I personally found this to be a big part of the tactical and strategic challenge. It reminded me a lot of Pokemon where you have a similar challenge, of slotting "exposure to fighting" into a limited action and HP budget.
Compare to Dota where support heroes have acquired more and more opportunities for assist gold/XP, it does in some sense make the game "easier" for the support players, but then the game is harder in other ways because now the supports are all way more farmed and dangerous than in older versions. It's the difference between controlling an army of many units and having to manage them all, versus controlling one unit and needing to work together within a team.
Highly suggest connecting with one of the lead developers, Charles Dang/Vultraz, if you have any C++ jobs in the USA.
He's been a developer on Wesnoth since 2012 but only graduated university in 2024. Unfortunately, it's been an absolutely brutal market for new graduates. Even if you're a maintainer on one of the most popular OSS C++ projects on GitHub.
I can't recommend him enough.
edit: LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-dang-10994b1b4
> Unfortunately, it's been an absolutely brutal market for new graduates.
Furthermore, more and more companies are looking for "professional" devs using AI tools such as Claude Code. By "professional" I mean proficient in using those AI tools, not actual knowledge. And they don't even specify this in the job offer and you learn this during the interview.