Play Games Inside Your Linux Terminal

So you spend most of your time on the terminal? Just entered a few commands? Feeling bored? How about some command line games? Yep, there are some oldies but goldies you can delve into for a little recreation on the terminal. So, how do your play games in terminal?

All you need to do is to install the required package and you get a ton of ways to “make use of” your time! Ubuntu users can get it via “sudo apt-get install ” or via the Synaptic package manager. Other users might want to check out their distribution’s package manager.

BSDgames

BSDgames consists of a quite a handful of programs. There are some pretty interesting games included in the package. Board games like backgammon, gomoku and Monopoly, some card games, some quizzes and puzzles like hangman and boggle.

Formatting and Interconversion – create banners, convert your messages to Morse code or convert text to and from rot13

Some screensavers – like rain and worms, which seem more like primitive animation.

Calculators to decrypt Caesar cyphers, calculate the phase of moon and generate prime numbers.

Other random stuff including score charts and game tutorials.

A lot of the games might not be as intuitive to the iPhone generation as you would think, so if you would like help on any of the games just type “man 6 <name of the game>”

nInvaders

Based on the classic space invaders game, nInvaders provides an ncurses based interface where you control the ship and set out to destroy the invaders before they reach you.

greed

Get greedy and eat as much of the screen as you can possibly eat. You can not cross over any spaces created by eating previous numbers so you might have to think a little and you might not actually want to get down right greedy.

robotfindskitten

Look for the kitten among the myriad of random characters and distinguish between the kittens and non kitten items.

There are some other terminal based games like bastet, ski, myman and overkill that you might want to check out.

For some other cool command line tricks check out the list of sites where you can learn cool tricks and also check out 5 applications to make your terminal better.

Do you know of some other cool programs to do some fun stuff on the terminal? Any other games you like to play in Linux terminal? Share them with us in the comments and don’t forget to mention which one you liked the most!