7 popular terminal games for GNU/Linux

Do you think that terminal games has lost their scope? Or a game should use most modern graphic features to make it good? Well, personally I don't think so. Games are great as long as it is capable to entertain people.

Most of the modern popular games make use of advanced graphics technologies to provide best experience to users. But these games are mostly targeting serious gamers and not meant for people who play games for fun. Also, these games requires sophisticated hardware resources and there is no reason for non-serious gamers or non-graphic designers to have such a system.

There are some terminal games, which make use of limited resources available on terminal to entertain people. It is a good choice for people who are looking for some small games to relieve their stress during serious work.


The opensource portal has published a list of 7 popular open source games for terminals. These games are 2048, BSD Games, Moon buggy, Nethack, ninvaders, nudoku and Robot Finds Kitten.

All these games can be installed in Fedora with following command.
$ sudo dnf install -y nethack bsd-games 2048-cli ninvaders nudoku moon-buggy robotfindskitten
[password]

Or you can use following command to install all these games except 2048 and nudoku
$ sudo apt install  nethack-console bsdgames  ninvaders  moon-buggy robotfindskitten
[password]
For me, this has meant replaying some of my classic favorites from the 90s and early 2000s, or newer independent games which pay homage to the styles and gameplay of my older picks. As a Linux gamer, it's had the added bonus of providing a high quality gaming experience with very little effort on a computer that is far from top-of-the-line.

Many of my favorites have had dedicated Linux ports created through the years, and still others run flawlessly on Wine or inside of DOSBox. While the games themselves may not be open source, at least much of the rest of my computing stack is open, and for that matter, also free-as-in-beer.
You can find brief description of all these games in original article published by opensource portal.

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