Free Games

The Battle for Wesnoth turn-based strategy, released under the GPL.

A turn-based game, also known as turn-based strategy, is a game where the game flow is partitioned in well-defined and visible parts, called turns or rounds. For example, when the game flow unit is time, turns represent units of time, like years, months, weeks, or days. A player of a turn-based game is allowed a period of analysis before committing to a game action, ensuring a separation between the game flow and the thinking process, which in turn leads presumably to better solutions. Once every player has taken his turn, that round of play is over, and any special shared processing, is done. This is followed by the next round of play.

Types

TBS games come in two flavors, depending on whether inside a turn players play simultaneously or take their (mini-)turns. The former games fall into the simultaneously-executed TBS games, with Diplomacy a notable example. The latter games fall into player-alternated TBS games, and are subsequently subdivided into (A) ranked, (B) round-robin start, and (C) random, the difference being the order under which players start within a turn, (A) the first player being the same every time, (B) the first player selection policy is round-robin, and (C) the first player is randomly selected.

Most board games are turn-based, otherwise gameplay would most likely get out of hand. Many single-player strategic video games are also turn-based. However, when a particular player gains access to the game during his/her turn it is not uncommon to value the time taken by the player to make the move to improve the fairness of the game. In Chess, a pair of stop clocks may be used to track the time taken by players to make their moves.

Turn-based gaming refers to Internet gaming sites that allow for game play to extend beyond a single session, over long periods of time?often taking months for complex games like Go or Chess to finish.

Examples

Example board games

• Risk, Monopoly, Parcheesi, Scrabble, Sorry!, Uno, Poker, Chess, Go, Othello, Diplomacy, Draughts

Examples Play-by-mail games

Play-by-email TBS games allow the orders to be passed in a very loose synchronization mechanism: email. In a way, it's the modern successor of the old play-by-mail style used in Europe in the mid-17th century: two chess players would be able to play together from miles away, if they could transmit their moves through some fast transport service, which happened to be (horse-powered) mail (postallion). PbeM examples: Atlantis PbeM or Dominions II.

Example computer games

Mainstream companies

After a period of converting board and historic TBS games to computer games, the big companies have started to come up with new ideas for computer TBS games.

Probably the best known turn-based game is Sid Meier's Civilization, which evolved into a long series of successor games and derivatives. Other notable examples include:

Heroes of Might and Magic
Jagged Alliance
Magic: The Gathering
Roguelike games
X-COM

In addition, many other games that are not generally turn-based have the notion of turns during specific sequences. Notably the roleplaying game Fallout is turn-based in the combat phase, allowing players and foes to lay up tactics against each other.

Indie game developers

An interesting market trend is the rise of Indie TBS games (games produced by small groups, independent or slightly affiliated with the computer games industry), which normally extend or refine one or another already existing TBS strategy games.

Amongst others, three good examples are *Age of Castles, *Battles of Norghan and *Leaderz.

Open source games

Open source has also seen the rise to games such as The Battle for Wesnoth. Directories such as Freshmeat provide large lists of open source turn-based strategy projects.

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