3 games you can play in the Linux terminal

Do you want to have more fun in the Linux terminal? There are several games you can play directly in your terminal emulator that are also free and open source, including some classics you may remember.

These three are just a small sample of games I was able to check out this week. There are several other games you can play specifically in the Ubuntu Terminal, and other distribution repositories will have their own selections. In this case, however, I tried to stick to games that are widely accessible across all distributions. I’ve also tried to provide a variety of genres, so hopefully there will be something for everyone.

MyMan: a simple clone of Pac-Man

If you are a fan of Pac-Man and want to play it on your Linux computer, one of the easiest methods is to simply get a clone for the terminal. There are several, but one of the best that I have tested that works in the terminal is MyMan. It is programmed using ncurses and is entirely based on ASCII text.

Short of using a retro gaming OS to emulate an old Pac-Man game, this may be the closest you’ll get to playing Pac-Man on Linux without any ROM. You play as a C character who makes his way through dots, and there are ghosts in the form of A characters. It’s not the most graphically advanced and there’s no audio, but I still had fun with it.

You can install MyMan with one of these commands:

sudo dnf install myman #Fedora
sudo pacman -S myman #Arch (AUR only)
sudo zypper install myman #openSUSE

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find myman in any Debian or Ubuntu repositories. However, you can install an alternative Pac-Man clone called pacman4console with the command sudo apt install pacman4console. In my opinion the design is not as good, but it is playable. Otherwise, you can check the MyMan SoucreForge files for code and build from source.

NetHack: a very textual rougelike

If you want to play a rougelike game on the Linux terminal, NetHack is one of the most developmentally mature games you will find in this genre. In fact, its initial release was all the way back in 1987 and, believe it or not, it’s still actively developed today.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a ton of gameplay value in NetHack. The story is vast, and apparently you’ll be able to discover new secrets and ways to play, even with multiple playthroughs.

To be frank, I’m personally not a huge fan of the RPG genre, so I can’t personally speak to how enjoyable it is or how it compares to others. Still, I know it has a very dedicated fan base, with several online discussion forums and wikis. It was ported to multiple platforms, sometimes with graphical layers added, and the game has been cited as an influence for many other popular games.

You can install console-based NetHack from most Linux distribution repositories.

sudo apt install nethack-console #Debian and Ubuntu
sudo dnf install nethack #Fedora
sudo pacman -S nethack #Arch
sudo zypper install nethack #openSUSE

nudoku: unlimited Sudoku grids

If you want to play endlessly generated free Sudoku games in the minimalist interface and limited resource base of a Linux terminal, give nudoku a try. It was made using the ncurses library to create a simple interface in the terminal that anyone can jump into and start playing.

You can use your arrow keys or Vim-like navigation to move around the grid, entering numbers to complete a puzzle. If you want higher difficulty than easy, you need to run Nudoku with settings. For example, to play on medium difficulty, you run nudoku -d normal. Change “normal” to “hard” if you want to maximize the difficulty.

You can install Nudoku on Linux repositories:

sudo apt install nudoku #Debian and Ubuntu
sudo dnf install nudoku #Fedora
sudo pacman -S nudoku #Arch
sudo zypper install nudoku #openSUSE

Interestingly, if you want to create nudoku from source using GitHub nudoku, you can compile it with the cairo package using the –enable-cairo flag, which gives you the ability to produce printable games. You can then run nudoku -d normal -p MySudokuPuzzle.pdf to produce a PDF with a Sudoku puzzle of normal difficulty.

Want a throwback experience? Try this

My final suggestion is not a game but rather a way to play.

If you play terminal games for nostalgia, you might like to try it with Cool Retro Terminal. It is a terminal emulator that emulates a CRT experience. It’s configurable, with multiple profiles that recreate the feel of specific devices that you might remember if you’ve been using computers long enough.

Open it and run any of the games I’ve listed here as you normally would. CRT will give your gaming experience a retro touch that will impress your friends, even if it degrades visibility a bit.

You can download Cool Retro Terminal from many Linux software repositories:

sudo apt install cool-retro-term #Debian and Ubuntu
sudo dnf install cool-retro-term #Fedora
sudo pacman -S cool-retro-term #Arch
sudo zypper install cool-retro-term #openSUSE

Want more? There are tons of games you can play for free on Linux. In fact, outside of the terminal, open source ports of classic games abound. In fact, when I’ve covered the topic in the past, I had to write a follow-up with even more classic Linux ports because the list was so long.

If you want to stick to the terminal but also increase your command line skills, you should look into games that hone your Linux skills.