Play Battle for Wesnoth

The Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game in a fantasy world.

It's available on various platforms like Windows, Linux and MacOS.

As the game is using SDL2, a port is available on Haiku!

Let's review it in details :)

Installation

The installation process is straightforward as the game is available through Haiku Depot.

Open the application and search for "wesnoth" in the "All packages" tab :

Then proceed with the installation :)

Play the game

The welcome screen let you select various game mode :

You can select features like :

• Campaign : play nice campaigns with various difficulty levels
• Multiplayer : play online or host a game on your system
• Map editor : edit your own maps !
• Preferences : adjust the game settings

If you don't know anything about the game, the best is to be familiar with the concepts.

For that there's a "Battle Training" tutorial I advice you to play :

In case you are familiar with the game, you can start some of the campaigns like "The South Guard" :

The fantasy graphical design of the game is really well achieved.

Each campaign presents a story before entering the game :

And a nice map is displayed, to let you discover the world of the campaign :

When you enter the game, the story continue at the bottom of the screen :

And the important characters are displayed with their location on the map :

Just before the game really starts, the objectives to achieve the current step of the campaign are displayed :

As you can see, the turns can be limited (to a maximum of 20 here) and in case some important characters are dead (Deoran here), the game will be failed .

A few tips to help you win :

• The more villages you own, the more gold you will receive during each turn
• Depending on the Day and Night cycle, it can be interesting to keep your unit safe or to let it attack
• When you need to heal a unit, put it on a village to take some rest
• The terrain provides different movement costs and defense bonuses
• Each unit is having unique traits and abilities

If you follow all these advises, the victory for easy levels should be reachable like below : 

When the victory is there, other characters will continue the story, so that the campaign can move to the next step :

As explained before, the units have different skills you can check in the Help :

For this unit, we can see that :

• It's very bad to be in deep water when it need to defend
• It's best to be a in castle to defend
• The unit has the best resistance to blade attack
• It has a poor resistance to fire attack
• The movement of the unit is fine in a castle or on flat land
• However in the hills, the movement is complicated

Unit can move during each turn, and it's symbolized with a path like below :

The only mixed point about the gameplay is that scrolling on the map is not always smooth due to the FPS:

You can adjust the full or windowed mode and the size of the window in the preferences :

You can also play online via the official server :

I didn't use this feature, so I let you discover it :)

In case you are fond of the game, you can also create maps !

The editor let you load a map like below :

And once loaded you can edit the terrain map :

It's really nice in case you want to create your own games on your local network :

You can host a game server on your machine, and let other players (or computers) connect to it to play with you on your own maps.

If you want to discover more about the game, the best is to go to the official website : https://www.wesnoth.org

Happy fantasy gaming under Haiku :)